ENDANGERED ARAMAIC LANGUAGE MAKES A COMEBACK IN SYRIA
Ian Black in Maaloula

guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 14 April 2009 10.29 BST

Syrian president Assad has set up an institute to revive interest in
the language of Christ

A stone ossuary bearing the inscription in the ancient Aramaic
language ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus’ Photograph: Biblical
Archaelogy Society/Corbis Sygma

Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket,
handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north
of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys
swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning
Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and
revive the world’s oldest living tongue, still close to what it
probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the
Christian era.

"In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same
language as we do in Maaloula today," said teacher Imad Reihan, one
of the pillars of this picturesque village’s Aramaic Language Academy,
where Barqil is studying.

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me") – Christ’s lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.

Recognised by Unesco as a "definitely endangered" language, Aramaic
is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics
( Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of
Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic
title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one
now wholly Muslim.

Aramaic’s long decline accelerated as the area opened up in the
1920s when the French colonial authorities built a road from Damascus
to Aleppo.

Television and the internet, and youngsters leaving to work, reduced
the number of speakers.

Nowadays, many local men are away driving the huge refrigerated trucks
that cross the desert to Saudi Arabia. Still, many old traces remain:
in nearby Sidnaya, worshippers at the Church of Our Lady speak Arabic
with a distinct Aramaic accent.

But things are definitely looking up. "When I was at school over
30 years ago, we were not allowed to speak Aramaic," said Mukhail
Bkheil, standing behind the counter in Abu George’s souvenir shop
in Maaloula’s main square, where buses disgorge tourists visiting
the beautiful Church of Mar Takla, an early Christian martyr, in
a grotto on the steep cliffside. "Now, thanks to President Assad,
we even have an institute teaching it."

Bkheil’s party piece is reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. But
he chats freely to friends, underlining the fact that the language
is alive and well, not just liturgical.

Saada Sarhan, the language academy administrator, learned Aramaic
as a child and is teaching her own children, but often=2 0feels
social pressure to speak Arabic when non-Aramaic speakers are
present. "Otherwise it’s rude," she says.

Improbably, Aramaic was given a boost by a Hollywood film, Mel Gibson’s
controversial Passion of the Christ, released in 2004 before the
academy was set up.

Founded by the University of Damascus with government help, its modern
premises boast a bank of PCs, new textbooks, a teaching staff of six
and 85 students at three different levels.

Elias Taja is another of them: this native Aramaic speaker and retired
maths teacher wanted to learn how to write the language. "I talk to
my wife and daughter Miladi only in Aramaic though my daughter does
sometimes reply in Arabic," he explained over cardamom-flavoured
coffee and locally grown pears.

Miladi, 25, recently married a man from Sidnaya who does not speak
Aramaic.

Taja worries she will not manage to pass it on to her children –
his grandchildren.

Syria being Syria, there are political sensitivities, not least because
"Arabisation" was a key feature of government education policy after
the Ba’ath party came to power in the 1960s.

"In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians,
Kurds and Assyrians, so it’s a big decision to allow the teaching
of other languages in government schools," said Reihan. "But the
government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because
it goes back so deep into Syria’s history."

Observers say the opening of the Aramaic academy showed a more
relaxed and confident attitude by the regime. Scholar George Rizkallah
dedicated his 2007 Aramaic textbook to the "great leader and patron
of the sciences and education Dr Bashar al-Assad". A large portrait
of the president hangs in the principal’s office, as in all public
buildings in Syria.

Considering the bitter enmity between Syria and Israel, which still
occupies the Golan Heights, it is striking that Aramaic letters are
so similar to the Hebrew used in rabbinic texts; one reason, perhaps,
why the only Aramaic sign in Maaloula is on the academy. "Otherwise
people might think some buildings were Israeli settlements," joked
one visitor from Damascus.

Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part
of its heritage. "Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula,"
said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at
Cambridge University. "It’s the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey,
Iraq and Iran that are really endangered."

Reihan and colleagues were delighted recently when a Unesco team came
to visit and hope for funds to allow them to collect vanishing words
into proper dictionaries. The teaching, meanwhile, goes on.

Ilyana started classes last November. "My father speaks Aramaic but my
mother doesn’t as she’s from Lebanon," she said. "I speak OK already
but I’m going to carry on as I want to become fluent. I do n’t know
too much about the Aramaic language but I do know that it’s ancient."