Aramaic languages is the Northwest Semitic family of Aramaic varieties, classified within Afro-Asiatic under Semitic, West Semitic and Central Semitic. Aramaic originated in the ancient region of Syria and spread across Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and Eastern Arabia, where varieties of it have been written and spoken for more than three thousand years. The family covers many distinct varieties tracked separately under their own ISO 639-3 codes, among them Imperial Aramaic, Classical Syriac, Classical Mandaic and Western Neo-Aramaic. Roughly two hundred forty thousand to two hundred fifty thousand people still speak modern Neo-Aramaic varieties today, concentrated in Assyrian, Mandean and Mizrahi Jewish communities.
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