Modern Aramaic
Over 400,000 people of various communities from across the Middle East, and recent emigrants who have moved out of these communities, speak one of several varieties of Modern Aramaic (also called Neo-Aramaic) natively, including by religious adherence; Christians, Jews, Mandaeans and a very small number of Muslims. Having lived in remote areas as insulated communities, the remaining modern speakers of Aramaic dialects escaped the linguistic pressures experienced by others during the large scale language shifts that saw the proliferation of other tongues among those who previously did not speak them, most recently the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa by Muslim Arabians, during their spread of Islam. Most of the people of that region who converted to Islam, and many from the remaining unconverted population, also adopted Arabic as their first language. The Aramaic speaking peoples such as Assyrians have preserved their traditions with schools, printing presses and now with electronic media.
The Neo-Aramaic languages are now farther apart in their comprehension of one another than perhaps they have ever been. The last 200 years have not been good to the Aramaic language. Instability throughout the Middle East has led to a worldwide diaspora of Aramaic-speakers. The year 1915 is especially prominent for Aramaic-speaking Assyrian Christians who experienced the Assyrian Genocide (Sayfo or Saypā; literally meaning sword in Syriac), and all Christian groups living in eastern Turkey in general (see also Armenian Genocide, Greek genocide) who were the subjects of the genocide that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire. For Aramaic-speaking Jews, 1950 is a watershed year: the founding of the state of Israel and consequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, including Iraq, led most Iraqi Jews, both Aramaic-speaking and Arabic-speaking Iraqi Jews, to emigrate to Israel. However, immigration to Israel has led to the Jewish Neo-Aramaic (and Jewish Iraqi Arabic) being replaced by Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) among children of the migrants. The practical extinction of many Jewish dialects seems imminent.
Read more about this topic: Aramaic Language
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