A Maltese professor is helping save a variety of Arabic that is spoken by Christians and written in the Latin alphabet. Despite its historic resemblance, this language is not Maltese.
Sanna is a mix of Arabic and ancient Aramaic that is spoken by only 800 people from Cyprus’ Christian Maronite minority. The youngest speakers are in their 50s and Unesco has included it in its list of severely endangered languages.
Until recently there was no documented literature or poetry in Sanna, but then Maltese linguist Prof. Alexander Borg came along.
His involvement with the Cypriot Maronites was prompted by his study of Arabic dialectology at the Hebrew University, engendered in a scholarly interest in the striking cultural and linguistic parallels with Maltese – also a diaspora variety of Arabic spoken by Christians. His sensitivity to the unfortunate fate meted out to Christian communities in the Middle East also urged him to help the community.
Prof. Borg told The Sunday Times of Malta that the Greek-Turkish hostilities of 1974 resulted in the dispersion of the Arabic-speaking Maronite community, which made it difficult for the transmission of its ancient language to the younger generation.
He was able to undertake post-doctoral work for some years with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and his study of Cypriot Maronite Arabic has proven to be a fascinating discovery process.
Survival prospects are not very bright
Although the Cypriot Maronites are often regarded as a Lebanese diaspora, his research demonstrated that their origins are in north Syria with close links to Mesopotamia. Significantly, the continuity of Cypriot Arabic with the traditions of eastern Christianity was also evident in its substratal formal links drawing on a variety of Western Aramaic, he noted.
“From a human angle, the situation of the Maronite speakers of Cypriot Maronite Arabic evokes striking historical parallels with those of sectarian minority groups in the adjacent mainland that speak highly distinctive vernaculars, such as the Aramaic-speaking Christian and Jewish communities traditionally residing in southeast Turkey, northeast Syria, north Iraq, northwest Iran and Egypt.
“Before the Bush and Blair invasion, Iraq had about 300,000 mostly Christian speakers of Aramaic. I can only shudder at the present fate meted out to many thousands of Aramaic speakers from that country and Syria,” he added.
When it came to proposing an orthography, although some were inclined to adopt the Greek alphabet, Prof. Borg opted for a slightly modified version of the Latin alphabet.
The use of this orthography seems to have caught on and there is now an attempt to produce translations of selections from the Bible. Apart from its use in Maltese, the Latin alphabet had also been used to transcribe Andalusi Arabic in the 16th century.
Sadly, survival prospects for the language are not very bright, but, given its intrinsic interest and the feelings of its speaker community, it would be irresponsible to neglect its documentation, he told this newspaper.
Sanna has been tendered the status of a minority language by the European Commission and Prof. Borg hopes that his own work will serve the needs of linguistic research from the perspectives of Arabic language history and comparative Semitics.