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Western Aramaic is a group of Aramaic dialects once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as Lebanon and the basins of the Orontes as far as Aleppo in the north. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by the Nabataeans, Palmyrenes, Mizrahi Jews, Melkites of Jewish and pagan descent, Samaritans, Galileans and Maronites. All of the Western Aramaic dialects are considered extinct today, except for the modern variety Western Neo-Aramaic, which is still spoken by the Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula and Jubb'adin in Damascus, Syria.

History

During the Late Middle Aramaic period, spanning from 300 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., Aramaic diverged into its eastern and western branches.

In the middle of the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrus (d. c. 466) noted that Aramaic, commonly labeled by Greeks as "Syrian" or "Syriac", was widely spoken. He also stated that "the Osroënians, the Syrians, the people of the Euphrates, the Palestinians, and the Phoenicians all speak Syriac, but with many differences in pronunciation", thus recording the regional diversity of Eastern and Western Aramaic dialects during the late antiquity.

Following the early Muslim conquests in the seventh century and the consequent cultural and linguistic Arabization of the Levant and Mesopotamia, Arabic gradually replaced Aramaic, including its Western varieties, as the primary language for most people.

Despite this, Western Aramaic appears to have survived for a relatively long time, at least in some secluded villages in the mountains of Lebanon and in the Anti-Lebanon mountains in Syria. In fact, up until the 17th century, travelers in the Lebanon region still reported villages where Aramaic was spoken.

Present

Today, Western Neo-Aramaic is the sole surviving remnant of the entire western branch of the Aramaic language, spoken by no more than a few thousand people in the Anti-Lebanon mountains of Syria, mainly in Maaloula and Jubb'adin. Until the Syrian Civil War, it was also spoken in Bakhʽa, which was completely destroyed during the war, and all the survivors fled to other parts of Syria or to Lebanon. Their populations of these areas avoided cultural and linguistic Arabization due to the remote, mountainous locations of their isolated villages.

See also

• Aramaic studies
• Bible translations into Aramaic
• Western Neo-Aramaic

Notes

1. The Palmyrene dialect has a dual affiliation because it combines features of both Western and Eastern Aramaic, but it is somewhat closer to the Eastern branch.

References

1. Tempus, Aspekt und Modalität im Reichsaramäischen (in German). Harrassowitz. p. 47. While the East Aramaic Palmyrene language seamlessly supplanted Imperial Aramaic as the language of Palmyra, likely in the second century BCE.…
2. Aramaic Inscriptions and Documents of the Roman Period. OUP Oxford. p. 43. …Palmyrene was a continuation of Official Aramaic and a close reflection of the spoken language of the Palmyrene region, with eastern Aramaic features….
3. Hellenistic and Roman Greece as a Sociolinguistic Area. John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 271. …Palmyrene Aramaic has preserved many old Aramaic features; on the other hand, it also shows isoglosses with the eastern dialects…
4. Pereira, Rodrigues (17 July 2018). Studies in Aramaic Poetry (c. 100 B.C.E.-c. 600 C.E.). BRILL. p. 7. ISBN 9789004358645. a number of elements which Syriac has in common with the Western Aramaic dialects. In a later study, Boyarin describes two phonetic changes which are apparently shared by Syriac and the Palestinian dialects. With the caution which is compulsory in such cases of parallel development, he ventures the hypothesis of the existence of certain isoglosses of Syriac and Palestinian Aramaic. According to Boyarin, besides those common features of Aramaic dialects which were inherited from earlier times, others may be supposed to rest upon innovations which spread through the dialects by diffusion. The main direction of this diffusion may have been either westward or eastward. This does not mean, of course, that Syriac should now be assigned to the group of the Western dialects. It may just demonstrate that in the course of the evolution of the Aramaic dialects it removed itself from Western Aramaic to a lesser extent than the other Eastern dialects.
5. Greenblatt, Jared (7 December 2010). The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Amadya. BRILL. p. 2. ISBN 9789004182578. , these dialects are the remnants of the western dialects of the Late Aramaic period
6. Arman Akopian (11 December 2017). "Other branches of Syriac Christianity: Melkites and Maronites". Introduction to Aramean and Syriac Studies. Gorgias Press. p. 573. ISBN 9781463238933. The main center of Aramaic-speaking Melkites was Palestine. During the 5th-6th centuries, they were engaged in literary, mainly translation work in the local Western Aramaic dialect, known as "Palestinian Christian Aramaic", using a script closely resembling the cursive Estrangela of Osrhoene. Palestinian Melkites were mostly Jewish converts to Christianity, who had a long tradition of using Palestinian Aramaic dialects as literary languages. Closely associated with the Palestinian Melkites were the Melkites of Transjordan, who also used Palestinian Christian Aramaic. Another community of Aramaic-speaking Melkites existed in the vicinity of Antioch and parts of Syria. These Melkites used Classical Syriac as a written language, the common literary language of the overwhelming majority of Christian Arameans.
7. Rafik Schami (25 July 2011). Märchen aus Malula (in German). Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Company KG. p. 151. ISBN 9783446239005. Ich kenne das Dorf nicht, doch gehört habe ich davon. Was ist mit Malula?‹ fragte der festgehaltene Derwisch. >Das letzte Dorf der Aramäer< lachte einer der…
8. Yaron Matras; Jeanette Sakel (2007). Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. De Gruyter. p. 185. doi:10.1515/9783110199192. ISBN 9783110199192. The fact that nearly all Arabic loans in Ma'lula originate from the period before the change from the rural dialect to the city dialect of Damascus shows that the contact between the Aramaeans and the Arabs was intimate…
9. Dr. Emna Labidi (2022). Untersuchungen zum Spracherwerb zweisprachiger Kinder im Aramäerdorf Dschubbadin (Syrien) (in German). LIT. p. 133. ISBN 9783643152619. Aramäer von Ǧubbˁadīn
10. Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold; P. Behnstedt (1993). Arabisch-aramäische Sprachbeziehungen im Qalamūn (Syrien) (in German). Harassowitz. p. 42. ISBN 9783447033268. Die arabischen Dialekte der Aramäer
11. Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold; P. Behnstedt (1993). Arabisch-aramäische Sprachbeziehungen im Qalamūn (Syrien) (in German). Harassowitz. p. 5. ISBN 9783447033268. Die Kontakte zwischen den drei Aramäer-dörfern sind nicht besonders stark.
12. Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold (2006). Lehrbuch des Neuwestaramäischen (in German). Harrassowitz. p. 133. ISBN 9783447053136. Aramäern in Ma'lūla
13. Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold (2006). Lehrbuch des Neuwestaramäischen (in German). Harrassowitz. p. 15. ISBN 9783447053136. Viele Aramäer arbeiten heute in Damaskus, Beirut oder in den Golfstaaten und verbringen nur die Sommermonate im Dorf.
14. Beyer 1986, p. 46, 55.
15. McNamara, Martin (2011). Targum and New Testament. Mohr Siebeck. p. 186. ISBN 9783161508363. a) Old Aramaic from the beginning (through Biblical Aramaic, Nabataean, Palmyrene) down to the established eastern and western branches; b) Middle Aramaic, with two branches, eastern and western; c) Late Aramaic, with the contemporary western (Ma'alula) and eastern branches. This older terminology is still followed by M. Sokoloff in his recent work, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period.'1 A different division, now widely accepted, has been put forward by J. A. Fitzmyer.2 It is as follows: a) Old Aramaic, up to 700 B.C.E.; b) Official Aramaic, 700-300 .c.E.; c) Middle Aramaic, 300 ..E.-200 c.E.; d) Late Aramaic (= Middle Aramaic of Rosenthal's division), with two branches: the eastern branch consisting of Syriac, Mandaic, the Aramaic of the Talmud Babli, the Gaonic Literature and incantation texts found mainly in Nippur; and the western, consisting of Samaritan Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Galilean Aramaic (which some, for example Sokoloff, prefer to call Jewish Palestinian Aramaic) found in the Aramaic portions of the Palestinian Talmud and haggadic midrashim and other sources; e) Modern Aramaic (in its eastern and western dialects).
16. Petruccione & Hill, p. 343. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPetruccioneHill (help)
17. Brock 1994, p. 149-150.
18. Taylor 2002, p. 302-303.
19. Aziz Halaweh, Fr (July 2020). The Church of Jerusalem and Its Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. AuthorHouse. ISBN 9781728360140. Late Aramaic dialects are divided into Western and Eastern. In the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrus distinguishes the dialects of the Osrhoenoi, Syroi, Euphratesioi, Palestininoi and Phoinikes, saying that there are differences between them.
20. Griffith 1997, p. 11–31.
21. Arnold 2000, p. 347.
22. Arnold 2012, p. 685–696.
23. "The Village of Bakh'a in Qalamoun: Interview". 26 January 2020.

Sources

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• Arnold, Werner (2008). "The Roots qrṭ and qrṣ in Western Neo-Aramaic". Aramaic in Its Historical and Linguistic Setting. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 305–311. ISBN 978-3-447-05787-5.
• Arnold, Werner (2012). "Western Neo-Aramaic". The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 685–696. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
• Beyer, Klaus (1986). The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. ISBN 978-3-525-53573-8.
• Brock, Sebastian P. (1971). "A Fragment of the Acta Pilati in Christian Palestinian Aramaic". The Journal of Theological Studies. 22 (1): 157–159. doi:10.1093/jts/XXII.I.157. JSTOR 23962351.
• Brock, Sebastian P. (1989). "Three Thousand Years of Aramaic Literature". ARAM Periodical. 1 (1): 11–23.
• Brock, Sebastian P. (1994). "Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria". Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 149–160, 234–235. ISBN 978-0-521-58736-5.
• Creason, Stuart (2008). "Aramaic" (PDF). The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 108–144.
• Gzella, Holger (2015). A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam. Leiden-Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-28510-1.
• Griffith, Sidney H. (1997). "From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods". Dumbarton Oaks Papers. 51: 11–31. doi:10.2307/1291760. JSTOR 1291760.
• Joosten, Jan (1991). "West Aramaic Elements in the Old Syriac and Peshitta Gospels". Journal of Biblical Literature. 110 (2): 271–289. doi:10.2307/3267086. JSTOR 3267086.
• Joosten, Jan (1992). "Two West Aramaic Elements in the Old Syriac and Peshitta Gospels". Biblische Notizen. 61: 17–21.
• Joosten, Jan (1994). "West Aramaic Elements in the Syriac Gospels: Methodological Considerations". VI Symposium Syriacum 1992. Roma: Pontificium institutum studiorum orientalium. pp. 101–109. ISBN 978-88-7210-305-0.
• Kim, Ronald (2008). "Stammbaum or Continuum? The Subgrouping of Modern Aramaic Dialects Reconsidered". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 128 (3): 505–531.
• Mengozzi, Alessandro (2011). "Neo-Aramaic Studies: A Survey of Recent Publications". Folia Orientalia. 48: 233–265.
• Morgenstern, Matthew (2012). "Christian Palestinian Aramaic". The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 628–637. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
• Petruccione, John F.; Hill, Robert C., eds. (2007). Theodoret of Cyrus: The Questions on the Octateuch. Vol. 2. Washington: COA Press. ISBN 978-0-8132-1499-3.
• Rubin, Rehav (2003). "Greek and Syrian Anchorites in the Laura of St. Firmin". ARAM Periodical. 15 (1–2): 81–96. doi:10.2143/ARAM.15.0.504527.
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• Sokoloff, Michael (2012). "Jewish Palestinian Aramaic". The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 610–619. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
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