Kormakitis, Cyprus — Ash precariously hung from the iOSif Skordis cigarette while reminding his classmates villagers in a language on the edge of extinction, one that partly traces his roots to the language that Jesus Christ once spoke.
Skordis, 97, is one of the only 900 people in the world who speak Maronita Chipriota or Sanna. Today, his people of Kormakitis is the last bastion of a language that once spoken by tens of thousands of people in dozens of villages.
The language, a branch of Syrian Arab that has absorbed some Greeks, has gone from generation to generation in this community whipped by the wind in Cyprus. Until less than two decades ago, there was no written script, or even an alphabet, since parents transmitted it to children in conversation. Only a handful of people are trained to teach it.
Sanna is at risk of disappearing, according to the Council of Minority Languages of Europe. An indigenous language dies every two weeks, estimates the United Nations, which decreases the tapestry of human knowledge in one thread at the same time.
But the Maronite community of 7,500 people in Cyprus is going back. With the help of the Chipriota government and the European Union, it has built schools, created a Sanna alphabet to publish textbooks and began classes to maintain the living and thriving language.
“Sanna … is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive characteristics of our cultural identity,” said Yiannakis Moussas, representative of the Maronite Community in the Cypriot Legislature. He spoke at the Kormakitis café adorned with football trophies and banned banners with a Lebanese cedar.
“And it is surprising evidence of our inheritance. The fact that we speak a kind of Arabic for so many centuries makes it clear that we descend from the areas of Syria and Lebanon.”
The language was taken to Cyprus by waves of Arab Christians fleeing persecution invading Arab Muslim combatants in what is now Syria, Lebanon and Israel, already starting in the seventh century.
Sanna at its root is a semi -language language that, unlike other Arab dialects, contains traces of the Aramaic that was spoken by populations before the Arabic invasion of Levante, according to the linguistic professor at the University of Cyprus, Marilena Kariolemou, who leads the team responsible for the revitalization of the language.
This is because the Maronite community in Chipre was isolated from other Arabic speaking populations.
But as the Maronitas interacted more and more with the majority Greek speech population of the island and became bilingual, Sanna evolved to incorporate several Greek words, which adds to its uniqueness among the many Arab dialects.
According to Kariolemou, Sanna contains five vowels similar to the Greeks and three others similar to Aramaic, while consonants whose sounds are formed in the back of the throat have decreased, probably due to Greek influence. Sanna also adopted the Greek syntax, he said.
Until the mid -1970s, the Maronite community was largely centered on four villages: Asomatos, Ayia Marina, Karpasia and Kormakitis as a cultural center.
But the Turkish Invasion of 1974 that Divide Cyprus In a separatist Turkish chipriot to the north and a Greek South Chipriota, where the internationally recognized government is sitting, saw most of the scattered shells throughout the south.
Asomatos and Ayia Marina are empty of inhabitants of Maronitas and are now fields of the Turkish army.
Moussas, the representative of the community, said that the consequences of 1974 were “catastrophic” for the Maronitas, since they gravitated towards the main cities of the island, putting their culture and language at risk as children attended Greek speech schools and marriage marriages with Greek chipriotas increased.
It is said that currently, only one in five maronite marriages are among community members.
That left kormakitis as the linguistic “hive” for the Arabic of the Maronita Chipriot, only spoken by residents over 50, according to the retired teacher Ilias Zonias. Born in Kormakitis, Zonias is the only native speaker in Sanna qualified to teach the language.
Kormakitis was a closed society in which residents spoke Sanna, while their children went to school without knowing Greek. This is how the language was preserved, Zonias said.
Even so, the speakers after 1974 began to decrease until around the change of millennium, when the Maronite community with the help of the Chipriot government increased efforts to save the language.
The Chipre membership in 2004 in the EU was a milestone for Sanna, since the block poured resources to safeguard the languages of indigenous minorities, a designation that the Cypriot authorities had granted.
Kariolemou said his team in 2013 established an engraved file of Sanna spoken, about 280 hours, for a greater study.
A 27 -letter alphabet was created in mostly Latin characters, thanks mainly to the work of the linguist Alexander Borg. The grammar was formulated and refined, which allows the publication of books for the teaching of Sanna.
Language courses are found in their early stages, Skordis said, with about 100 children and adults in Kormakitis classes and Saint Maronas primary school in the Lakatamia suburb in Nicosia. A summer language camp for children and adults in Kormakitis has also been created.
An initiative for native speakers is being carried out, mainly residents of Kormakitis, to learn to teach Sanna.
In Ayios Maronas Primary School, 20 children of kindergarten are learning the language with books that contain QR codes that can be scanned so that students can follow an audio adaptation in tablets provided by the school.
But for Sanna to have a real future, there is no substitute for young families returning in large quantities to Kormakitis, where the language can be taught in the newly built and financed school, Mousas said.
Community leaders, however, are not satisfied with the low number of people who express interest. Moussas said that community leaders and the Chipriot government are looking to offer incentives, mainly to facilitate the search for homes.
For Zonias, keeping language alive for centuries would be the crowned achievement of your career.
“I don’t want to be Sanna’s last teacher,” he said.
