Home to 4 dialects represented on Dialect Atlas, spanning 4 language families.
also: Shami
Spoken across Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Known for soft consonants and a shared cultural vocabulary.
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety, used across southeast Turkey, northern Syria, and parts of Iraq and Iran.
also: Maaloula Aramaic, Siryon
The only surviving Western Aramaic vernacular, spoken in the Anti-Lebanon villages of Maaloula, Bakhʿa, and Jubbʿadin north of Damascus by both Christian and Muslim communities. Fewer than 10,000 fluent speakers remain after wartime displacement, most of them older adults.
Domari spoken by Dom communities across the wider Levant — the West Bank and Gaza beyond Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Documentation outside Jerusalem is uneven and largely lexical.