We give a characterization of hypercyclic finitely generated abelian semigroups of matrices on C n using the extended limit sets (the J-sets). Moreover we construct for any n ≥ 2 an abelian semigroup G of GL(n, C) generated by n + 1 diagonal matrices which is locally hypercyclic but not hypercyclic and such that JG(e k ) = C n for every k = 1, . . . , n, where (e1, . . . , en) is the canonical basis of C n . This gives a negative answer to a question raised by Costakis and Manoussos.