Western Aramaic languages

The Western Aramaic languages are a group of several Aramaic languages developed and once widely spoken throughout the ancient Levant, as opposed to those from in and around Mesopotamia, which make up what is known as the Eastern Aramaic languages, which are still spoken as mother tongues by the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriacs and Mandaeans of Iraq, north eastern Syria, south eastern Turkey and north western Iran. All of the Western Aramaic languages are extinct today except Western Neo-Aramaic.

Western Aramaic
Geographic
distribution		Middle East
Linguistic classificationAfro-Asiatic
Subdivisions
Glottologwest2815[1]

History

Following the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century and the cultural and linguistic Arabization of the Levant, Arabic gradually displaced various Aramaic languages (including the Western Aramaic varieties) as the first language of most people. Despite this, Western Aramaic appears to have survived for a relatively long time, at least in some villages in mountainous areas of the Mount Lebanon range and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains (in modern Syria). In fact, up until the 17th century, travelers in the Lebanon region still reported Aramaic-speaking villages.[2]

Present

Today, Western Neo-Aramaic is the sole surviving remnant of the entire Western branch of the Aramaic languages, spoken by no more than a few thousand people in the Anti-Lebanon of Syria, mainly in Maaloula, Jubb'adin and Bakhah. The speakers avoided cultural and linguistic Arabization due to the remote mountainous isolation of their villages.

gollark: I've not had any issues with btrfs yet. Though stuff I installed recently is configured with f2fs, so I'm not sure how much is using it.
gollark: "Offline" in the sense of "not visible to the internet", I haven't burned it to blu-rays or something.
gollark: I have offline low-resolution copies of styro's videos for if (when) YouTube does something stupid personally, too.
gollark: The annoying thing is that bedrock edition is much better technologically but not moddable in any significant way, not usable on Linux and overly monetized.
gollark: It's going to be my website's april fools' joke.

References
  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Western Aramaic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. Owens, Jonathan (2000). Arabic as Minority Language (owens) Csl 83. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-016578-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link), page 347
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.