Cypriots rush to save Sanna, a language with just 900 speakers left

KORMAKITIS (CYPRUS): Ash dangled precariously from Iosif Skordis' cigarette as he reminisced with fellow villagers in a language on the edge of extinction, one that partly traces its roots to the language Jesus Christ once spoke.The 97-year-old is one of only 900 people in the world who speak Cypriot Maronite Arabic, or Sanna. Today, his village of Kormakitis is the last bastion of a language once spoken by tens of thousands of people.Until less than two decades ago, the tongue, an offshoot of Syrian Arabic that has absorbed some Greek, had no written script, since children learnt it from parents orally. Sanna is at risk of disappearing, according to the Council of Europe's minority language experts. But the 7,500-strong Maronite community in Cyprus is pushing back. With help from the Cypriot govt and the EU, it has built schools, created a Sanna alphabet to publish textbooks and begun classes to keep the language alive and thriving.Sanna was brought to Cyprus by Arab Christians fleeing invading Arab Muslim fighters in what is now Syria, Lebanon and Israel, starting as early as the 8th century. Sanna at its root is a semitic language that, unlike other Arabic dialects, contains traces of the Aramaic that was spoken by populations prior to the Arab invasion of the Levant, says University of Cyprus linguistics professor Marilena Kariolemou, who leads the team responsible for the language's revitalisation.