Saving Neo-Aramaic

ARAMAIC WATCH: The last of the Aramaic speakers: In a race against time, a team of elite scholars work together to record the final remnants of a rich linguistic history ( Miriam Shaviv, Times of Israel). A wide-ranging article on attempts to preserve the Neo-Aramaic dialects while there are still speakers alive. Hard to excerpt (read it all) but here's a taste:

For most people, that there are any native speakers of Aramaic left at all will come as a surprise. In fact there are half-a-million, and Khan is one of a tiny band of researchers trying to document their speech. But it is a race against time. The most fluent speakers are all beyond retirement age, and the language is expected to die within a generation.

“The final voices are with us for another 10 years, but will be silent very soon,” says [Cantabrigian linguist Geoffrey] Khan.

Background here. Tangentially related post here.