by Hummam Sheikh Ali

MAALOULA, Syria, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian community speaking the ancient Aramaic language is struggling to keep the language of Jesus Christ alive as the Syrian war has had a toll on that ancient Semitic language.

Aramaic, a Semitic language spoken by the ancient Middle Eastern people known as Aramaeans, was most closely related to Hebrew, Syriac, and Phoenician and was written in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet.

In the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, the language gradually supplanted the Akkadian language as the lingua franca of the Middle East.

This ancient language was also believed to have been spoken by Jesus Christ and it continued in wide use until about 650 CE, when it was supplanted by Arabic.

In some Christian communities in Syria, people are still speaking Aramaic and hold their prayers in this language.

However, when the war erupted in Syria, many of the people who were speaking the language left their areas and traveled outside the country.

In Maaloula, one of the three towns speaking the language in Syria, people are now making big efforts to revive the language and teaching it to the young generation as their area is being rehabilitated after its liberation from the rebels.

While construction work was still being carried out at the main square in that predominantly Christian town, whose residents are still holding on to their original language, two classrooms in a monastery were receiving children to teach them Aramaic.

Antoinette Mokh, one of the residents teaching Aramaic to children, told Xinhua that she inherited the language from her parents and she would like to pass it on to the children.

"I took the language from my parents and passed it on to my kids and now I am teaching it to other children," Mokh told Xinhua.

She noted that the process of teaching the Aramaic language is only verbal not written as they would write the Aramaic words in Arabic letters.

"We are teaching the children the language verbally not in a written form because our main goal is to keep preserving this language because if it wasn't passed on from father to son, there would be no way this language could survive," she said.

"There are efforts exerted to save the language, one of which was the establishment of the Aramaic Language Institute to preserve the language and I think we need more efforts to save the language and keep it alive," she said.

But despite the efforts to pass on the language, the people in Maaloula didn't hide their fears of the extinction of the language as it has become only a language of religion whose speakers are drifting further in other countries.

Rita Wahbeh is a woman from Maaloula who can recite prayers in Aramaic.

Her beautiful voice penetrates the silence of a hall in a church while reciting prayers in the Aramaic language, giving the listener a sensation of traveling back in time to take a glimpse of what people used to speak and pray in the ancient times.

The woman hoped the government could do something to keep the language alive.

"I hope the government could do more to preserve the language, either through teaching it in the Damascus University or in the Aramaic institute here," she said.

For Hanan Shamseh, another woman selling souvenirs near the Mar Taqla monastery in Maaloula, the recent fear about the language comes as the people are more interested in the Arabic language.

"The interest in the Aramaic language has increased because people here are becoming more prone to speak Arabic because it's the main language in Syria," she told Xinhua.

George Zarour, a historian and Aramaic speaker, told Xinhua that the language is truly in danger.

"The Aramaic language is in a grave situation for many reasons, mainly the war in Syria and the battles in Maaloula that led to the migration of families because they were the storage of the language in this geographic point," he said.

He added that language must be taught in all schools in Maaloula not only on a low scale or at homes as it's the case nowadays.

The lovers of this heritage and history, however, are doing their best to keep Aramaic alive through several activists, such as reviving old Aramaic songs, not only prayers in churches.

Hussam Eddin Brimo, a Syrian musician and the founder of LUNA Choirs, has recently held his first festival of Aramaic singing in Damascus.

He told Xinhua that despite the dangers, Aramaic is still alive.

The man said that they found out that many of the local dialects in Syria use some of the old Aramaic words without knowing it's Aramaic.

Aramaic resembles the Syrians as many words spoken in the local dialect nowadays are originally Aramaic, not Arabic, he added.

"We believe that the festival ended with songs that are recorded on CDs, which entered the homes of people to listen to them and get to know the language so that they feel how this language resembles them," he said.

He hoped that similar projects could see light and "we will try to do more and we hope that this project could resonate with people and be conducive in preserving the language."

It took his choir three years to learn how to sing in Aramaic, which is a big effort by people who are willing to preserve the language.