Abstract

Samaritan Aramaic belongs with the Jewish and Christian Palestinian Aramaic languages to the Late Western Aramaic dialect group within the Aramaic branch of Northwest Semitic. The Western Aramaic dialects are literary languages from the first centuries ce that are based on vernaculars spoken in different areas of Palestine. Immediate predecessors are unattested, but are rather to be sought in western Old Aramaic than in the Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid Aramaic literary languages in use in Palestine from the 5th century bce to the 1st century ce (viz. Imperial Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, Qumran Aramaic). The ancestor of Western Neo-Aramaic (Chapter 24) also belonged to the Late Western Aramaic dialect group, and this affiliation is still borne out by shared lexical and morphological features (Stadel 2013).