The Aramaic languages, by Father Yakup Aydin

We’re in France, in the outskirts of Paris… just so we can fly out straight to Mesopotamia.

We’re joined by Father Yakup Aydin, priest of the Syriac Orthodox church of Antakya in France. His mother language is Toroyo, a languages descending from Aramaic, said to be the language of Christ.

Taking a stroll into distant past. Aramaic is a Semitic language officially recognized over 2,500 years ago! In the 7th century B.C. Aramaic becomes the administrative language of the Neo-Assyrian Empire followed by the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires, and thus the common language of the Middle East. Aramaic already included several dialects prior to the Christian era. One of these was the language Jesus Christ preached in.

Nowadays, the remaining of what has become a group of languages are Syriac, the classical and liturgical variation (such as Latin for Romance languages); Sureth, spoken in Iraq (and a few villages of North-East Syria) and in Hakkari (South-East Turkey); Toroyo, in southeastern Turkey, the language of Ma’loula, spoken by Greek Melkite Christians and even some Muslims in villages around Damascus; and Mandaic, severely endangered.

Father Aydin’s language, Toroyo, still gathers around 50,000 speakers living between the Tur-Abdin (Mountain of the Servants) region in Turkey, the city of Qamishli in Syria, and a diaspora mostly settled in northern Europe. In France, some of them live near Paris, in Montfermeil and its surroundings. The near 500 of them all arrived in the 70s and 80s.

Father Aydin tells us here about this community who prays in his church every week, and continues to speak his language everyday.

Special thanks to Jean-Claude Luyat for his footage shot in Turkey, and to Jean Sibille, Alain Desreumaux, and Claude Haberer for the all the valuable information they have provided.