Western Neo-Aramaic as an Islamic Language? A Look at Some Lexical and Sociolinguistic Issues

Abstract

Western Neo-Aramaic (WNA) is spoken as a minority language by less than 10.000 people in 3 villages of the Qalamūn plateau, 60 km to the north-east of Damascus (Syria). The whole populace of Baxʕā and Ǧubbʕadīn and about one-third of the inhabitants of Maʕlūla are Muslim, while the rest of the inhabitants of the third village are Christian, as is still a minority of the people of the region, since the parallel processes of religious Islamization and linguistic Arabization have followed diverse paths and different chronology. Since WNA has no native written tradition, the usual criteria defining an Islamic language put forward by Bausani (1981), namely allography in the Arabic/Persian script and a significant quota of Islamic religious vocabulary, cannot apply in this case. This paper discusses the possibility of laying down other parameters of linguistic Islamicity for part of WNA along the lines of the relevant debate in the fields of communal variation and Jewish interlinguistics, and opts in the end for a lexical/phraseological approach. We stress, however, that the linguistic situation portrayed in this paper is the pre-2010 one.