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The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer became extinct and was forgotten until the 19th century. This distinguishes it from other languages of the area such as Hebrew, Akkadian, which also comprises Babylonian and Assyrian, and Aramaic, which are Semitic languages.

Sumerian was the first known written language. Its script, called cuneiform, meaning "wedge-shaped", was later also used for Akkadian, Ugaritic and Elamite. It was even adapted to Indo-European languages like Hittite (which also had a hieroglyphic script, as did the Egyptians) and Old Persian, though the latter merely used the same instruments, and the letter shapes were unrelated.

Sumerian is agglutinative, meaning that each word consisted of one or more clearly distinguishable and separable parts; as opposed to isolating languages like Chinese, in which each word appears in only one form, and inflectional languages, like English, Latin, and Russian, in which words appear (to a greater or lesser degree) in a variety of different forms with affixes which cannot be easily separated from the root. Sumerian made heavy use of compounding. For example, the words for great and man are compounded for the Sumerian word for king, "lugal".

Sumerian is an split ergative language. This means that the subject of a sentence with a direct object is in the so-called ergative case, which is marked with the suffix -e. The subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object (of a transitive verb) are in the absolutive case, which in Sumerian, and most ergative languages, is marked by no suffix (or the so-called "zero suffix"; e.g. lugal-e e2 mu-du3 "the king built the house"; lugal ba-gen "the king went".

• Isolated languages