From Lingua Franca to Endangered Language, The Legal Aspects of the Preservation of Aramaic in Iraq

Aramaic is the oldest, yet weakest, of the family of Semitic languages. Enormously influential on both the history of alphabet development and the history of writing throughout Asia, Aramaic is today preserved only in limited pockets of the Middle East in its spoken and written form. In the large diaspora, scattered in the Former Soviet Union, Australia, South America, Europe and the United States, it is disappearing. The largest and most compact community of Aramaic users is that of the indigenous Christians of Iraq ­ collectively referred to in recent legal Iraqi documents as the ChaldoAssyrians. 1

Yet the final fate of Aramaic is not sealed. It hangs in the balance in the tumult and often-deadly politics of Iraq. In this paper I will concentrate on three legal documents, promulgated in Iraq over the past three years, which have the potential to affect the fate of the oldest living language of the Middle East, and the second oldest continuously written and spoken language of the world, after Chinese. The documents are the constitution of the Kurdish Regional Government, the Kurdish draft for the Iraqi constitution, and the Transitional Administrative Law.

Language chauvinism, the hallmark of emerging states, infected the Middle East for much of the 20 th century and saw the destruction of Aramaic educational resources as well as the physical existence of the Aramaic-speaking communities. Enlightened public language policy, coupled with respect for the rights of non-conforming ethnic groups, and international pressure may be the determining factors in whether Aramaic will disappear in this century in all but the halls of seminaries and yeshivas.

A Name for a Language

Aramaic, like historical and contemporary Arabic, is separated into several important dialects. These dialects for the most part, do not have continuous written documentation: some dialects still do not have a written form but have relied on a written standard far different from the spoken language. This written standard, among Christian Aramaic speakers, has been Classical Syriac, for which written materials have existed in an unbroken line throughout the Christian era.

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