Hebrew

The earliest Hebrew script was derived from a Phoenician script. The modern Hebrew script was developed from a script known as Proto-Hebrew/Early Aramaic. The earliest known writing in Hebrew dates from the 11th century BC.
Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic. By 70 AD use of Hebrew as an everyday language had largely ceased, but it continued to be used for literary and religious functions, as well as a lingua franca among Jews from different countries.
During the mid-19th century the first efforts were made to revive Hebrew as a everyday language. One man who played a major role in these efforts was Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922), who was the first to make exclusive use of Hebrew in his home, and encouraged the use of Hebrew among others, as well as its use in schools.
Today Hebrew is spoken by some 5 million people in Israel, where it is an official language along with Arabic. and a further 2 to 3 million people speak the language in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Panama, the UK and USA.

Notable features

• Type of writing system: abjad
• Direction of writing: right to left in horizontal lines.
• Number of letters: 22 consonants, plus final letters and diacritics
• Used to write: Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish and many other Jewish languages.
• Some letters (kaf, mem, nun, fe and tzadi) have a final form (sofit), which is used when they appear at the end of a word.
• There are no separate numerals in Hebrew, instead standard western numerals (1, 2, 3, etc) are used.
• Long vowels can be indicated by the letters alef, vav, and yod. Short vowels are not usually marked, except in the Bible, poetry and books for children and foreign learners. 

Arabic

The Arabic script evolved from the Nabataean Aramaic script. It has been used since the 4th century AD, but the earliest document, an inscription in Arabic, Syriac and Greek, dates from 512 AD. The Aramaic language has fewer consonants than Arabic, so during the 7th century new Arabic letters were created by adding dots to existing letters in order to avoid ambiguities. Further diacritics indicating short vowels were introduced, but are only generally used to ensure the Qur'an was read aloud without mistakes.
There are two main types of written Arabic:

1. Classical Arabic - the language of the Qur'an and classical literature. It differs from Modern Standard Arabic mainly in style and vocabulary, some of which is archaic. All Muslims are expected to recite the Qur'an in the original language, however many rely on translations in order to understand the text.
2. Modern Standard Arabic - the universal language of the Arabic-speaking world which is understood by all Arabic speakers. It is the language of the vast majority of written material and of formal TV shows, lectures, etc.

Each Arabic speaking country or region also has its own variety of colloquial spoken Arabic. These colloquial varieties of Arabic appear in written form in some poetry, cartoons and comics, plays and personal letters. There are also translations of the Bible into most varieties of colloquial Arabic.
Arabic has also been written with the Hebrew, Syriac and Latin scripts.

Notable Features

• Type of writing system: abjad
• Direction of writing: words are written in horizontal lines from right to left, numerals are written from left to right
• Number of letters: 28 (in Arabic) - some additional letters are used in Arabic when writing placenames or foreign words containing sounds which do not occur in Standard Arabic, such as /p/ or /g/. Additional letters are used when writing other languages.
• Used to write: Arabic, Baluchi, Dari, Hausa, Kabyle, Kashmiri, Kazak, Kurdish, Kyrghyz, Malay, Morisco, Pashto, Persian/Farsi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Siraiki, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur, Urdu and a number of other languages
• Most letters change form depending on whether they appear at the beginning, middle or end of a word, or on their own. 
• Letters that can be joined are always joined in both hand-written and printed Arabic. The only exceptions to this rule are crossword puzzles and signs in which the script is written vertically.
• The long vowels /a:/, /i:/ and /u:/ are represented by the letters 'alif, yā' and wāw respectively.
• Vowel diacritics, which are used to mark short vowels, and other special symbols appear only in the Qur'an. They are also used, though with less consistency, in other religious texts, in classical poetry, in books for children and foreign learners, and occasionally in complex texts to avoid ambiguity. Sometimes the diacritics are used for decorative purposes in book titles, letterheads, nameplates, etc. 

English

English is a West Germanic language related to Dutch, Frisian and German with a significant amount of vocabulary from French, Latin, Greek and many other languages.
English evolved from the Germanic languages brought to Britain by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic tribes, which are known collectively as Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Old English began to appear in writing during the early 8th century AD.
Approximately 341 million people speak English as a native language and a further 267 million speak it as a second language in over 104 countries including the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, American Samoa, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Botswana, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cameroon, Canada, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands and Denmark.

 

Urdu (اردو)

Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language with about 104 million speakers, including those who speak it as a second language. It is the national language of Pakistan and is closely related to and mutually intelligible with Hindi, though a lot of Urdu vocabulary comes from Persian and Arabic, while Hindi contains more vocabulary from Sanskrit. Linguists consider Standard Urdu and Standard Hindi to be different formal registers both derived from the Khari Boli dialect, which is also known as Hindustani. At an informal spoken level there are few significant differences between Urdu and Hindi and they could be considered varieties a single language.
Urdu is also spoken in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, Fiji, Germany, Guyana, India, Malawi, Mauritius, Nepal, Norway, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, the UAE, the UK and Zambia.
Urdu has been written with a version of the Perso-Arabic script since the 12th century and is normally written in Nastaliq style. The word Urdu is Turkish for 'foreign' or 'horde'