It is derived from the Greek term ‘Palaestina’ which means "Land of the Philistines". The Philistines are a seafaring people who settled in a small coastal region to the northeast of Egypt, around the twelfth century B.C.E which is near the present-day Gaza.

Analogous to the Jews, the Palestinians, or otherwise, regionally known as Philistines, too are a Semitic people. Their languages too are similar. Palestinians, for the most part speak Arabic and Jews speak Hebrew apart from which English too is a prevalent language of the Gaza strip.

While one delves into the history of the Philistines, they had a language of their own which was called the Philistine language and which later got extinct. There is not sufficient information of the language of the philistines as very little is known about the language. However, one can relate the language to the Indo-European languages and even to the Mycenaen Greek language thus propping up the independently-held theory that the language originated among seafaring people.
From the later stages of the iron-age, inscriptions have been excavated in the Gaza-strip that bear non-Semitic names in the Philistine language providing ample evidence in favor of the assumption that the Philistines did originally speak some Proto-Indo-European language. As per date, English, Arabic and Hebrew are the three chiefly spoken languages of the Gaza-strip.

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