Jewish Palestinian Aramaic

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic
Region	Palestine
Era	200 - 1200 AD
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Aramaic Western Aramaic Jewish Palestinian Aramaic
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	jpa
Glottolog	pale1261

The Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, also called Galilean Aramaic, was a Western Aramaic language spoken by the Jews in Roman and Byzantine Palestine in the early first millennium. The language is notable for being that spoken by Jesus (see Language of Jesus).

After the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 AD, the center of Jewish learning in the land of Israel moved to Galilee. With the Arab conquest of the country in the 7th century, Arabic gradually replaced this language.

The most notable text in this dialect's corpus is the Jerusalem Talmud, which is still studied in Jewish religious schools and academically, although not as widely as the Babylonian Talmud, which is written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.

Many extant manuscripts in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic have been corrupted over the years of their transmission by Eastern Aramaic-speaking scribes freely correcting "errors" they came across (these "errors" actually being genuine Jewish Palestinian Aramaic features). To date, all formal grammars of the dialect fall victim to these corruptions, and there is still no published syntax.

See also

• Galilean dialect