I just read in the Smithsonian that there is a community of people who speak Aramaic in Skokie, IL.
You gotta love this country. Could I ever imagine I would be sharing a state with speakers of Aramaic?
Aramaic
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
I just read in the Smithsonian that there is a community of people who speak Aramaic in Skokie, IL.
You gotta love this country. Could I ever imagine I would be sharing a state with speakers of Aramaic?
Clarissa's Blog 
I assume that they’re members of a Christian relious sect that has taught itself Aramaic in an effort to be more Christ-like, rather than an actual group of native speakers.
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Skokie (suburb of Chicago) has a significantly-sized Jewish population originating from different parts of the world. I am guessing that many who speak Aramaic there are actually Jewish and may very well indeed be “native” speakers.
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No, the article says they are native speakers who emigrated to escape from religious persecution at home.
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Good to know, and I am so sorry to make an assumption. But yes, I used to work in Skokie and I am not surprised that they would be native speakers one way or another.
Thank you for the update, Clarissa! 🙂
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I was surprised to learn this, too!
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Aha! I’ve read the article, which I should have done in the first place. Duh.
Well, they’re definitely not “members of a Christian religious sect that has taught itself Aramaic in an effort to be more Christ-like” as the first commentator assumed.
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The article starts: “It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.”
I really wish people wouldn’t say or imply that the modern descendant of language X is the language of someone who lived thousands of years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that if a speaker of Modern Aramaic was transported back in time 2000 years, there is little doubt that they wouldn’t understand the Aramaic spoken back then. 2000 years of language change will do that to any language. While Modern Aramaic is a descendant of Ancient Aramaic, it is misleading to imply (without qualifications) that they are “same language”.
We could easily make the same claim with a different language. Like Latin. The modern Romance languages are the descendants of the Latin spoken in Ancient Rome. By the article logic, they are all the “language of the Ancient Romans”. However, the modern Romance languages (for example, Spanish and Romanian) are clearly different languages (while obviously related). Hence, while it is correct to say that Spanish and Romanian are descendants of the language of the Ancient Romans, it is misleading to claim that they are the language of the Ancient Romans.
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Yes, I think the journalist wanted to make the article more sensationalist.
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There are Christian communities in Syria and Iraq who speak Aramaic. So presume they are from there. Don’t see a link to the article. The Talmud and many other Jewish texts as well a couple of books of the Bible are written in ancient Judeo-Aramaic so a lot of Orthodox Jews know how to read some Aramaic but they definitely don’t speak it as a language. Hebrew and Aramaic are closely related though. Bit like Dutch and English say.
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