Samaritan Aramaic Language

Samaritan Aramaic Language

Samaritan Aramaic, or Samaritan, is the dialect of Aramaic used by the Samaritans in their sacred and scholarly literature. This should not be confused with the Samaritan Hebrew language of the Scriptures. It ceased to be a spoken language some time between the 10th and the 12th centuries.

In form it resembles the Aramaic of the Targumim, the Aramaic word for “interpretation” or “paraphrase”, and is written in the Samaritan alphabet.

Important works written in Samaritan include the Samaritan translation of the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch in the form of the targum paraphrased version. There are also legal, exegetical and liturgical texts, though later works of the same kind were often written in Arabic.