I did not mean to write a book about my mother tongue going extinct – because if you’d told me, at any point in my childhood ...

He also plans to take courses in Judeo-Neo-Aramaic, a language with an estimated 60 speakers left. “Knowing a language is one thing, but getting to learn and improve together with other people ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.