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What language do they speak in Syria?
The short answer
Arabic, officially and by a large majority, spoken day to day as Syrian Arabic, a dialect of Levantine Arabic. Kurdish is second by number of speakers. Armenian, Syriac, Aramaic, Adyghe, and Turkish are each spoken by established communities, and Aramaic survives as a living mother tongue in three villages north of Damascus.
6 min read Last reviewed September 2026 Part of the Language pillar
Quick facts
- Official language: Arabic
- Second most spoken: Kurdish
- Scripts in everyday use: Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Latin
- Aramaic speakers: a few thousand, in three villages
- English: some, mainly in Damascus, Aleppo, and tourism
Go deeper
The full guides
Last reviewed September 2026. Speaker numbers for Syria's minority languages are estimates rather than counts, and displacement since 2011 has made them harder to establish.