Technical sheet

Name of the language in Aramaic : ܣܘܪܝܝܐ

Spoken in: Iran, Turkey, Syria, CSI

by around 400.000 people

Particular features: Aramaic, a Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew, is one of the most important languages of the ancient world. It originated in what is now known as Syria, but became widespread as the language of trade and administration in the entire Near and Middle East (in modern day Pakistan, where Aramaic translations of Aśoka's inscriptions have been found) and as a language of enormous religious importance (in Turkestan in its Syrian declination). In Achaemenid Persia, it was the official language of the empire, while in Roman Palestine it was the language of the people, as Hebrew had long become a purely liturgical language. It was actually the language spoken by Jesus Christ, who even on the point of death expressed himself in Aramaic, saying: “Ελ(ο)ί Ελ(ο)ί λάμμα σαβακτανί” (“My God, My God, why have you abandoned me”), as related in the Greek gospels (Matthew 27:47, Mark 15:34). Certain parts of the Hebrew Bible were also written in Aramaic (two words in Genesis 31:47; Jeremiah 10:11; Esdras 4:8-6:18 and 7:12-26; Daniel 2:4b-7:28). Due to its vast geographical distribution and persistency through time, there exist numerous diatopic and diachronic variations of the language, so that it would be more correct to talk about “Aramaic languages”. A particular version of Aramaic - Syriac, spoken in Edessa - became the language of culture of eastern Christianity, and is used still today as a liturgical and cultural language in certain eastern Christian churches, including the Indian churches of Malabar and Malankar. An unusual fact: the language is still spoken today in certain areas of Iraq and Iran under the incorrect name of “Assyrian”.

Code ISO639-1: syr

encoding: Utf-8

script: Syriac