Preserving a Unique Dialect of Iranian Jewish Aramaic

At the beginning of the 20th century, Aramaic—once the Near East’s lingua franca and the native tongue of most of the world’s Jews—was widely spoken in Jewish communities in Iraq, Iran, and other areas. Since then various waves of persecution, of which the depredations of Islamic State are only the most recent, have greatly reduced the number of speakers of the language. Jacqueline Taylor describes one of several Jewish dialects of what linguists term Neo-Aramaic: