Aramaic: The language of Jesus Christ. It is a fascinating language with a history of fame and failure, and not much hope for the future. Despite its demise, it will never be forgotten because of its use in writings like The Bible and The Talmud; using script derived from the Phoenician Alphabet. Aramaic belongs to the Semitic subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family. At its beginnings, it was spoken by Arameans in upper Mesopotamia. Today, it is spoken among a collection of different places and peoples. In order to understand this spread of Aramaic, one must understand the history of this once great language.
Aramaic shows itself in history for the first time sometime during the late 11th century BCE. It slowly began its ascent to popularity until it reached its climax in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE when it replaced Akkadian as the Lingua Franca of the Middle East. At first, the Assyrians grew in power over the Arameans and decided to deport the speakers of Aramaic all over the middle east. This plan backfired on the Assyrians because Aramaic started to take root in all the different places it had been planted and eventually became the Lingua Franca. Aramaic became so widely used that even when the Achaemenian Persian dynasty gained power between 539 and 330 BCE, they continued to use Aramaic rather than impose Persian. In the 6th century BCE, Aramaic continued its reign by replacing Hebrew as the language of the Jews. Hebrew did however remain the language of upper class Jews and governmental affairs, while Aramaic was spoken by the common people of Jewish society. Aramaic was claiming ground for a couple hundred years until it was replaced by Greek as the new Lingua Franca of Eurasia when Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenian Persian dynasty. Despite its fall from the title of Lingua Franca, Aramaic continued to be widely used until 650 CE when it was replaced by Arabic during the spread of Islam.
Today, Aramaic is a dying language. It has been split into many different dialects most likely due its dispersion at the hands of the Assyrians. There are two main branches: East and West Aramaic.
East Aramaic consists of three main dialects: Eastern Neo Assyrian, Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, and Syriac. These dialects are still spoken by small groups of Jacobite and Nestorian Christians in the Middle East. West Aramaic consists of four main dialects: Nabataean, Palmyrene, Palestinian-Christian, and Judeo-Aramaic. These dialects are still spoken in Syria.
The current language health of most of these Aramaic dialects can be classified as Moribund. There are less than a half of a million speakers of all the dialects combined. According to Ethnologue, the largest dialect is Assyrian Neo-Aramaic which is spoken by only 232,000 people worldwide. The other larger dialects are Chaldean Neo-Aramaic which is spoken by 206,000 people worldwide, and Tuayo which is spoken by 62,000 people worldwide. The smallest of these dialects are the Héctevin and Bohtan Neo-Aramaic which are both spoken by a mere 1,000 people in Georgia and Iran. Classical Mandaic is now extinct but was spoken in Iran. This gradual death can be due to a few factors. The main reason for Aramaic’s decline is a result of the dispersion that occurred after the Assyrian’s took power. While this event actually helped Aramaic rise to power at first, it later resulted in many different dialects which created difficulty in the language’s ability to retain strength through connection between its speakers. The other reason for Aramaic’s fall is that it is not being taught to younger generations, which is one of the main reason in any languages death.
As for the future of the Aramaic language, John McWhorter, a linguistics professor from Columbia University, predicts that Aramaic will become extinct within the next century. However, efforts are being made to preserve the language. Groups of linguists have taken on the task of recording all of the different dialects of Aramaic, and it is even being taught as a second language in some schools. Hopefully, the language will not reach the point of extinction so that we may continue to dwell in the beautiful literature and culture that is produced from Aramaic.