East Aramaic language

Aramaic (אַרָמָיָא Arāmāyā, Classical Syriac: ܐܪܡܝܐ‎, Arabic: آرامية‎) is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, which also includes the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. The Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets.

During its approximately 3,100 years of written history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires and as a language of divine worship, religious study and as the spoken tongue of a number of Semitic peoples from the Near East.

Historically, Aramaic was the language of Aramean tribes, a Semitic people of the region around between the Levant and the northern Euphrates valley. By around 1000 BC, the Arameans had a string of kingdoms in what is now part of western Syria. Aramaic rose to prominence under the Neo-Assyrians (911–605 BC), under whose influence Aramaic became a prestige language and its use spread throughout most of Mesopotamia and the Levant. At its height, variants of Aramaic were spoken in all over what is today Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Palestinian territories, Kuwait, Eastern Arabia, Northern Arabia, and to a lesser extent parts of southeast and south central Turkey, and parts of northwest Iran.. Aramaic was the language of Jesus, who spoke the Galilean dialect during his public ministry, as well as the language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and also one of the languages of the Talmud.