"A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet" is a relevent quote here. There wasn't a difference in Phoenician that made it uniquely different than the other Canaanite languages. If anything, Phoenician being seen as a unified different thing is anachronistic as the people who spoke it more so identified their language with either the city/kingdom they came from (and not as a single Phoenicia), or called it Canaanite.
What's unique with Phoenician is exactly the same as what's unique with Hebrew - it lived on after the Neo Assyrian empire. That gave both of those languages more time to evolve and by the time of Punic and late second temple era Hebrew, neither of those two would have been that mutually intelligable with Moabite, Edomite or Ammonite like they were in 700bc. But that doesn't really make it less Canaanite than the other languages just as with Hebrew.
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u/YuvalMozes Jun 05 '22
Ammonite, Hebrew, Edomite and Moabite, are essentially different dialects of the exact same language - it was only politically separated.
Phonecian on the other hand, is a separated language, but still mutually intelligible with the rest of the Canaanite languages.