In a televised interview on April 1, Syrian Cultural Minister Mohammed Saleh claimed that the Syriac language is “an ancient Arabic dialect.” His remarks drew outrage from the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac minority community as an attempt to erase their identity and history.
“We in the Culture Board of North and East Syria affirm that the Syriac language is an independent Semitic language belonging to the Aramaic branch, with a documented history extending for thousands of years,” said a statement from the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES).
During the interview, Saleh also claimed that the name “Syria” means “the masters,” from which the English word “sir” was derived. The DAANES also slammed that remark as one that has “no reliable or scientific basis, and constitutes an explicit infringement on the linguistic and cultural identity of the Syriac-Assyrian people, who are considered among the oldest indigenous people in this land.”
“As for the name ‘Syria,’ its origins go back to the civilizations and peoples of this region, and was given by the Greeks to refer to an area inhabited by Assyrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Arameans, and Syriacs,” the statement affirmed.
Syriac, one of the oldest languages in the world, is spoken by many Christians in the Middle East as their mother tongue. Speakers are mostly concentrated in the Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac community’s indigenous homeland spanning across parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
It is also spoken in Jordan, Israel, Armenia, Georgia, and Lebanon by smaller pockets of the community.
The Rojava administration further slammed Saleh’s remarks as ones that “express totalitarian, exclusionary thinking, and the transitional government must be cautious of such thinking.”
“Preserving cultural and linguistic diversity in Syria is not a favor or a gift, but rather an essential condition for building a pluralistic democratic state based on mutual recognition and respect for others,” it stressed.
A prominent Syriac-Assyrian party based in Rojava also condemned the remarks.
“The statements of Syria’s minister of culture regarding the Syriac language are rejected and unacceptable. We see this as an erasure and marginalization of Syriac identity and language,” Sanharib Barsoum, co-chair of the Syriac Union Party, told Rudaw on Monday.
“This is the same policy that the former Baath regime followed, considering the Syriac people as Christian Arabs to erase an important part of Syria’s ancient history,” he stressed.
