The Iraqi people are people originating from the country of Iraq.
The Levant is the subregion that borders the Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west and core West Asia, or by the political term, Middle East, to the east. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in western Asia: i.e. the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Egypt and Cyrenaica in Northern Africa.
Syria's estimated pre–Syrian Civil War 2011 population was 22 ±.5 million permanent inhabitants, which included 21,124,000 Syrians, as well as 1.3 million Iraqi refugees and over 500,000 Palestinian refugees. The war makes an accurate count of the Syrian population difficult, as the numbers of Syrian refugees, internally displaced Syrians and casualty numbers are in flux. The CIA World Factbook showed an estimated 20.4m people as of July 2021. Of the pre-war population, six million are refugees outside the country, seven million are internally displaced, three million live in rebel-held territory, and two million live in the Kurdish-ruled Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant, namely in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.
Turoyo, also referred to as Surayt, or modern Suryoyo, is a Central Neo-Aramaic language traditionally spoken by Assyrians in the Tur Abdin region in southeastern Turkey and in northern Syria. Turoyo speakers are mostly adherents of the Syriac Orthodox Church, but there are also some Turoyo-speaking adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, especially from the towns of Midyat and Qamishli. The language is also spoken throughout diaspora, among modern Assyrians. It is classified as a vulnerable language. Most speakers use the Classical Syriac language for literature and worship. Its closest relatives are Mlaḥsô and western varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic like Suret. Turoyo is not mutually intelligible with Western Neo-Aramaic, having been separated for over a thousand years.
Western Neo-Aramaic, more commonly referred to as Siryon, is a modern variety of the Western Aramaic branch consisting of three closely related dialects. Today, it is spoken by Christian and Muslim Arameans (Syriacs) in only three villages – Maaloula, Jubb'adin and Bakhʽa – in the Anti-Lebanon mountains of western Syria. Bakhʽa was vastly destroyed during the war and most of the community fled to other parts of Syria or Lebanon. Western Neo-Aramaic is believed to be one of the closest living languages to the language of Jesus, whose first language, according to scholarly consensus, was Galilean Aramaic belonging to the Western branch as well; all other remaining Neo-Aramaic languages are Eastern Aramaic.
Maaloula is a town in southwestern Syria. The town is located in the Rif Dimashq Governorate and is 56 km northeast of Damascus, and is built into the rugged mountainside at an altitude of more than 1,500m. It is known as one of three remaining villages where Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken, the other two being the nearby smaller villages of Jubb'adin and Bakhʽa. However, Bakhʽa was vastly destroyed during the Syrian Civil War, and all the inhabitants fled to other parts of Syria or to Lebanon.
Lebanese Arabic, or simply Lebanese, is a variety of Levantine Arabic, indigenous to and primarily spoken in Lebanon, with significant linguistic influences borrowed from other Middle Eastern and European languages. Due to multilingualism and pervasive diglossia among Lebanese people, it is not uncommon for Lebanese people to code-switch between or mix Lebanese Arabic, French, and English in their daily speech. It is also spoken among the Lebanese diaspora.
Assyrians in Syria also known as Syriacs are an ethnic and linguistic minority that are indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia, the north-eastern half of Syria. Syrian-Assyrians are people of Assyrian descent living in Syria, and those in the Assyrian diaspora who are of Syrian-Assyrian heritage.
The Neo-Aramaic or Modern Aramaic languages are varieties of Aramaic that evolved during the late medieval and early modern periods, and continue to the present day as vernacular (spoken) languages of modern Aramaic-speaking communities. Within the field of Aramaic studies, classification of Neo-Aramaic languages has been a subject of particular interest among scholars, who proposed several divisions, into two, three or four primary groups.
Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, who have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.
Arabs represent the major ethnicity in Syria, in addition to the presence of several, much smaller ethnic groups.
Western Aramaic is a group of Aramaic dialects once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as Lebanon and the basins of the Orontes as far as Aleppo in the north. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by in the north, by Palmyrenes and the Aramaeans who settled on Mount Lebanon, who would give way to the early Maronites. In the south, by Judeans, Galileans, Samaritans, Pagans, Melkites, Nabataeans and possibly the Itureans. All of the Western Aramaic dialects are considered extinct today, except for the modern variety Western Neo-Aramaic, which descends from the Damascene Aramaic and is still spoken by the Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula and Jubb'adin in Damascus, Syria.
Eastern Aramaic refers to a group of dialects that evolved historically from the varieties of Aramaic spoken in the core territories of Mesopotamia and further expanded into northern Syria, eastern Arabia and northwestern Iran. This is in contrast to the Western Aramaic varieties found predominantly in the southern Levant, encompassing most parts of modern western Syria and Palestine region. Most speakers are Assyrians, although there is a minority of Mizrahi Jews and Mandaeans who also speak modern varieties of Eastern Aramaic.
Religion in Syria refers to the range of religions practiced by the citizens of Syria. Historically, the region has been a mosaic of diverse faiths with a range of different sects within each of these religious communities.
Ethnic groups in the Middle East are ethnolinguistic groupings in the "transcontinental" region that is commonly a geopolitical term designating the intercontinental region comprising West Asia without the South Caucasus, and also comprising Egypt in North Africa. The Middle East has historically been a crossroad of different cultures and languages. Since the 1960s, the changes in political and economic factors have significantly altered the ethnic composition of groups in the region. While some ethnic groups have been present in the region for millennia, others have arrived fairly recently through immigration. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Egyptians, Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis but there are dozens of other ethnic groups that have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of members.
Jubb'adin is a village in southern Syria, administratively part of the Rif Dimashq Governorate, located northeast of Damascus in the Qalamoun Mountains. Nearby localities include Saidnaya and Rankous to the southwest, Yabroud and Maaloula to the northeast, and Assal al-Ward to the northwest.
Al-Sarkha, Bakhʽah or Bakh'a is a Syrian village in the Yabroud District of the Rif Dimashq Governorate. According to the Syria Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), Al-Sarkha had a population of 1,405 in the 2004 census. The village, inhabited by Sunni Muslims of Aramean descent, it was vastly damaged during the Syrian Civil War, and most of the inhabitants fled to other parts of Syria or to Lebanon as refugees. It is one of the only three remaining villages where Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken, alongside Maaloula and Jubb'adin.
Levantine Arabic vocabulary is the vocabulary of Levantine Arabic, the variety of Arabic spoken in the Levant.
In Lebanon, most people communicate in the Lebanese dialect of Levantine Arabic, but Lebanon's official language is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). French is recognized and used next to MSA on road signs and Lebanese banknotes. English is the fourth language by number of users, after Levantine, MSA, and French. Most Armenians in Lebanon can speak Western Armenian, and some can speak Turkish. Additionally, different sign languages are used by different people and educational establishments.
