Documentation of Modern Western Aramaic language
General information about the language
Modern Western Aramaic, or Siryōn (Sirjoːn) to its speakers, is the sole surviving representative of the Western Aramaic languages. Prior to the Syrian Civil War (2011– present), it was spoken in three villages in the Rif Dimashq Governorate of the Syrian Arab Republic, Maaloula (Maʕluːla, Arabic Maʿlūlah, al-Qutayfah District), Baχʕa (Arabic al-Ṣarxah, Yabroud District), and ʁuppaʕoːð (Arabic Jubbʕadīn, al-Qutayfah District). Regarding the present number of speakers, there is no certain data available. Residents of Maaloula today estimate that there are roughly 10,000 speakers living within two of the villages (Maaloula and ʁuppaʕoːð). More speakers formerly resided in these two villages, and in the village of Baχʕa, which was destroyed during the war and subsequently abandoned. These speakers are today distributed across a growing diaspora.
| Name | Population, 2004 | Population, 2021 | Speakers, 2021 | Speaker Percentage, 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maaloula | 2,762 | 1,700 [/7,400] | 350–400 | 20.3% |
| Baχʕa | 1,405 | 0 [/4,500] | 4,375 | 95 % |
| ʁuppaʕoːð | 3,778 | 9,800 [/9,800] | 9,310 | 95 % |
| Diaspora | n/a | 10,700 | 500 | 4.7% |
All of these speakers live within larger (and growing) monolithically Arabophone popu- lations, and consequently speak that language in addition to Siryōn. Within Maaloula, at most only a few hundred individuals have a confident command of the language. Most members of the younger generations are passive or partial speakers of the language, com- prehending it but lacking an active control, and consequently they prefer to communicate with one another in Arabic. Even those few remaining fluent speakers have largely failed to pass their command of the language to their own children. The language was therefore likely already moribund at the start of the war, but the present conflict has accelerated the timetable for its demise, as many of the villagers have fled the region, and one of the three villages (Baχʕa/al-Ṣarxah) was ruined and completely deserted.
History of the research
The most extensive and recent samples of Modern Western Aramaic comprise the four volumes published by Werner Arnold from 1989–1991 (Arnold 1989, 1990a, 1991a, 1991b). These were followed by 111 short texts, which the late Aki’o Nakano collected from a speaker from ʁuppaʕoːð between 1989 and 1990, and published without translation in 1994. Arnold’s most recent contribution (2019) is a new dictionary, the first since Bergsträsser (1921 [1966]), based upon the heretofore published corpus and therefore admittedly limited by its size (at roughly 200,000–250,000 tokens). Arnold has also published a descriptive grammar (1990b), for which he furnishes information in parallel columns for all three dialects whenever necessary. The primary focus of this grammar is the morphology of the language, and its description of phonology is limited, particularly with regard to syllable structure and suprasegmental phenomena. Even more of a desideratum is an updated description of verbal morphosyntax, after Correll’s 1978 contribution, which depended upon the texts that were available to him at the time, primarily those of Prym and Socin which Bergsträsser published (1915), the products of Bergsträsser’s own field work (1919), those of Cantarino (1961), those of Reich (1937), and those of Correll himself (1969). Spitaler also employed the texts of Bergsträsser (1915 and 1919) and Reich (1937) as sources for his 1938 grammar, which does not address syntax except in a perfunctory manner. The syntax proper of Modern Western Aramaic therefore remains largely undescribed. Most of Correll (1978) is dedicated to verbal morphosyntax, but 33 pages (99–132) concern clause-level syntax. Additionally, Cohen has contributed an article on verbal morphosyntax (1979) as well as 52 pages of his monograph (1984 [2003]), which address the MWA verb from a diachronic perspective. The most urgent tasks facing the researchers engaged in documenting Modern Western Aramaic are therefore enlarging the existing corpus and eventually creating a comprehensive description of the syntax, which will require a much larger corpus than that presently available.
Our informants
TBA