If a Middle Eastern man from 2,500 years ago found himself on his home territory in 2015, he would be shocked by the modern innovations, and not just electricity, airplanes, and iPhones. Arabic as an official language in over two dozen countries would also seem as counterintuitive to him as if people had suddenly started keeping aardvarks as pets.A nice summary history of the Aramaic language. One point deserves some nuancing:
In our time-traveler’s era, after all, Arabic was an also-ran tongue spoken by obscure nomads. The probability that he even spoke it would be low. There were countless other languages in the Middle East in his time that he’d be more likely to know. His idea of a “proper” language would have been Aramaic, which ruled what he knew as the world and served, between 600 and 200 B.C.E., as the lingua franca from Greece and Egypt, across Mesopotamia and Persia, all the way through to India. Yet today the language of Jesus Christ is hardly spoken anywhere, and indeed is likely to be extinct within the next century. Young people learn it ever less. Only about half a million people now speak Aramaic—compared to, for example, the five and a half million people who speak Albanian.
How does a language go from being so big to being on the verge of dying out entirely?
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Here is also why Jesus and other Jews lived in Aramaic, and why goodly portions of the Hebrew Bible are actually in Aramaic. The two languages are part of the same Semitic family, but still, when the Book of Daniel switches into Aramaic for five chapters because Chaldeans are being addressed, it’s rather as if Cervantes had switched into Italian in Don Quixote for the tale of the Florentine nobleman.The "Chaldeans" (and I could get sidetracked on a long discussion of the development of that word) would have spoken Babylonian Akkadian rather than Aramaic, and the writer of Daniel probably would have been aware of this. No one is quite sure why the middle of the book of Daniel (2:24b through chapter 7) is written in Aramaic (with 1:1-2:4a and chapters 8-12 in Hebrew), but it doesn't seem to have to do with a change in the language of the speakers in the story. True, the Masoretic text may imply this when it says "(in?) Aramaic" in 2:4a, but this could just be an addition to mark the change in language in the book. The only Qumran Daniel manuscript that contains this passage is damaged at just this point and it is unclear if it contained the word "Aramaic." Daniel converses with Babylonians in chapter 1 and chapter 8 as well, with no indication of a language change.
As for the future of Aramaic, I hope it doesn't die out. A vast Aramaic literature survives and there are dispersed Aramaic-speaking communities that are trying to maintain their traditions. We'll see. I wish them the best. Cross-file under Aramaic Watch and Modern Aramaic Watch.
