Western Aramaic languages in the context of "Christian Palestinian Aramaic"

Antiochian Greek Christians (also known as Rūm) are an ethnoreligious Eastern Christian group native to the Levant. The majority of its members identify as Arab, though some of the members reject the Arab label and instead identify as Greek. They are either members of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch or the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, and they have ancient roots in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the southern Turkish province of Hatay, which includes the city of Antakya (ancient Antioch—one of the holiest cities in Eastern Christianity). Many of their descendants now live in the global Near Eastern Christian diaspora. They primarily speak Levantine Arabic, with Maaloula near Damascus being one of the few places where a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken.

Modern Hebrew (endonym: עִבְרִית חֲדָשָׁה, romanized: 'Ivrit ḥadasha, IPA: [ivˈʁit χadaˈʃa] or [ʕivˈrit ħadaˈʃa]), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only extant Canaanite language, as well as one of the oldest languages to be spoken as a native language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the sole official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by over 10 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is nearly universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.

A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Israelites until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted by a western dialect of the Aramaic language, the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a spoken language.

Syrians (Arabic: سوريون) are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians (particularly the Assyrians and Syriac-Arameans) retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.

The national name "Syrian" was originally an Indo-European corruption of Assyrian and applied to Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, however by antiquity it was used to denote the inhabitants of the Levant. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Arab identity gradually became dominant among many Syrians, and the ethnonym "Syrian" was used mainly by Christians in Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia who spoke Syriac. In the 19th century, the name "Syrian" was revived amongst the Arabic speakers of the Levant. Following the establishment of the Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, the name "Syrian" began to spread amongst its Arabic speaking inhabitants. The term gained more importance during the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, becoming the accepted national name for the Arabic speakers of the Syrian Republic.

Eastern Aramaic refers to a group of dialects that evolved historically from the varieties of Aramaic spoken in the core territories of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, southeastern Turkey and parts of northeastern Syria) and further expanded into northern Syria, eastern Arabia and northwestern Iran. This is in contrast to the Western Aramaic varieties found predominantly in the southern Levant, encompassing most parts of modern western Syria and Palestine region. Most speakers are Assyrians (including Chaldean Catholics), although there is a minority of Bavlim Jews and Mandaeans who also speak modern varieties of Eastern Aramaic.

Palmyrene Aramaic was a Middle Aramaic dialect, exhibiting both Eastern and Western Aramaic grammatical features, and is therefore often regarded as a dialect continuum between the two branches. It was primarily documented in Palmyra itself, but also found in the western parts of the Roman Empire, extending as far as Britannia. Dated inscriptions range from 44 BCE to 274 CE, with over 4,000 known inscriptions, mostly comprising honorific, dedicatory, and funerary texts. The dialect still retains echoes of earlier Imperial Aramaic. The lexicon bears influences from both Koine Greek and, to some extent, Arabic.

The dual had disappeared from it.