The Philistine language (/ˈfɪləstiːn, ˈfɪləstaɪn, fəˈlɪstən, fəˈlɪstiːn/)^[1] is the extinct language of the Philistines. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survived as cultural loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine five cities ("Pentapolis"),^[2] or the ’argáz receptacle, which occurs in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else,^[3] or the title padî.^[4]

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Quick Facts Native to, Ethnicity ...

Philistine
Native to	Philistia
Ethnicity	Philistines
Extinct	c. 9th century BC
Language family	unclassified
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	None

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To judge from inscriptions alone, it could appear that the Philistine language is simply part of the local Canaanite dialect continuum which includes Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite, Ekronite, and Phoenician.^[5][6] For instance, the Ekron inscription, identifying the archaeological site securely as the Biblical Ekron, is the first connected body of text to be identified as Philistine, on the basis of its location. However, it is written in a Canaanite dialect similar to Phoenician and Hebrew.^[7]

There is not enough information about the language of the Philistines to relate it confidently to any other languages. Possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, support the theory that immigrant Philistines originated among "sea peoples". There are hints of non-Semitic vocabulary and onomastics, but the inscriptions, not clarified by some modern forgeries,^{[clarification needed][8]} are enigmatic:^[9] a number of inscribed miniature "anchor seals" have been found at various Philistine sites.^[10] On the other hand, evidence from the slender corpus of brief inscriptions from Iron Age IIA-IIB Tell es-Safi (Tell es-Safi inscription)^[11] demonstrates that at some stage during the local Iron Age, the Philistines started using one of the dialects of the local Canaanite language and script,^[12] which in time masked and replaced the earlier, non-local linguistic traditions, which doubtless became reduced to a linguistic substratum, for it ceased to be recorded in inscriptions. Towards the end of the Philistine settlement in the area, in the 8th and the 7th centuries BC before their destruction by Assyria, the primary written language in Philistia was a Canaanite dialect that was written in a version of the West Semitic alphabet so distinctive that Frank Moore Cross termed it the "Neo-Philistine script".^[13] The Assyrian and Babylonian conquests destroyed the Philistine presence on the coast. When documentation resumes, under the Achaemenid Empire (Persian Empire), it is in the Aramaic language, the lingua franca of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Achaemenid empires.