For this post I will draw a few basic points from this interview with Pennsylvania State University's Assyriologist Gonzalo Rubio: http://www.livescience.com/history/dead-languages-sumerian-akkadian-assyriologist-q-a-101213.html
Sumerian and Akkadian were the languages of Ancient Mesopotamia, which is approximately the region of present-day Iraq. They were spoken during the Bronze Age in the "Cradle of Civilization." Ancient Mesopotamians had the first complex urban civilization in the world that gave rise to writing and advances in art, science, mathematics, and politics.
Sumerian was first spoken around 1300 BC (5000 years ago). Sumerian and Akkadian are both dead languages. They employed a writing system called cuneiform.
Sumerian is very similar in structure and grammar to other, more modern Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Akkadian, on the other hand, has a completely different structure; Rubio says that Akkadian sentence structure is comparable to the sentence structure of Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and many Native American languages. This does not mean that Sumerian is related to any of those languages, it is only a comparison based on one single, very specified aspect of language.
Rubio and other Assyriologists analyze documents such as myths, legal texts, economic documents, poems, sales receipts, scientific and scholarly texts, and letters.
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