Neo-Mandaic

Neo-Mandaic (Arabic,رطنة (Raṭnah), in Persian: مندائی نو (Mandā'i-ye no)) is the modern reflex of Classical Mandaic, the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. Although severely endangered, it survives today as the first language of a small number of Mandaeans (possibly as few as 300-500 speakers) in Iran and in the Mandaean diaspora. All Neo-Mandaic speakers are bi- or even tri-lingual in the languages of their neighbors, Arabic and Persian, and the influence of these languages upon the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is considerable, particularly in the lexicon and the morphology of the noun. Nevertheless, Neo-Mandaic is more conservative even in these regards than most other Neo-Aramaic dialects. As the only known surviving modern reflex of any literary dialect of Aramaic, it has one of the longest continuous histories of attestation of any Aramaic dialect and is therefore potentially of great interest to scholars of Aramaic.