Sabar on preserving Aramaic

ARAMAIC WATCH: Ariel Sabar has an article in Smithsonian on a project to preserve nearly-extinct Neo-Aramaic dialects:

How to Save a Dying Language
Geoffrey Khan is racing to document Aramaic, the language of Jesus, before its native speakers vanish

By Ariel Sabar
Smithsonian magazine, February 2013, Subscribe

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.

The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language—once the tongue of empires—follows its last speakers to the grave.

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Ariel Sabar is known for his book My Father's Paradise, about his father, the Aramaic scholar and speaker, Yona Sabar. Background here and links.