Cyprus Maronites battle to preserve rare ancestral language FEATURE 03/07/2010

Cyprus Maronites battle to preserve rare ancestral language FEATURE 03/07/2010 NICOSIA — With his twice-weekly lessons, Elias Zonias is fighting to preserve the ancestral language of Cyprus’s dwindling Maronite community, described by experts as a “treasure” but now threatened with extinction by rapid demographic change. Every year the number of children at the island’s only Maronite school has been shrinking, he says, highlighting the difficulty of keeping alive his native tongue, a unique form of Arabic that is strongly influenced by the Aramaic spoken by Jesus and his followers. “I feel that I’m lucky because I’m part of a small group of people who speaks this language well,” says Zonias, 41, a cheerful father of three with a passion for photography.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune ALTERNATE URL: http://www.tribune.net.ph/commentary/20100307com6.html

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