of the Christian Melkite (Chalcedonian) community from the 5th to the 8th century. As a liturgical language, it was used up to the 13th century. It is also been called "Melkite Aramaic" and "Palestinian Syriac". The language itself comes from Old Christian Palestinian Aramaic, but its writing conventions were based on early Middle Syriac, and it was heavily influenced by Greek. For example, the name Jesus, Syriac īšū‘, is written īsūs, a transliteration of the Greek form, in Christian Palestinian. Modern Aramaic As the Western Aramaic languages of the Levant and Lebanon have become nearly extinct in non-liturgical usage, the most prolific speakers of Aramaic dialects in the 21st century are Sureth Eastern Neo-Aramaic speakers, the most numerous being the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic speakers of Mesopotamia. This includes speakers the Assyrian (235,000 speakers) and Chaldean (216,000 speakers) varieties of Suret and Turoyo (112,000 to 450,000 speakers). Having largely lived in remote areas as insulated communities for over a millennium, the remaining speakers of modern Aramaic dialects, such as the Assyrians, and the Arameans, escaped the linguistic pressures experienced by others during the large-scale language shifts that saw the proliferation of other tongues among those who previously did not speak them, most recently the Arabization of the Middle East and North Africa by Arabs beginning with the early Muslim conquests of the seventh century. Modern Eastern Aramaic Modern Eastern Aramaic exists in a wide variety of dialects and languages. There is significant difference between the Aramaic spoken by Assyrian Syriac Christians, Jews, and Mandaeans. The Christian varieties are often called Modern Syriac, Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Syriac, particularly when referring to their literature, being deeply influenced by the old literary and liturgical language, the Syriac language. However, they also have roots in numerous, previously unwritten, local Aramaic varieties and some contain Akkadian language influences, and are not purely the direct descendants of the language of Ephrem the Syrian. The varieties are not all mutually intelligible. The principal Christian varieties are Suret, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, all belonging to the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages and spoken by ethnic Assyrians in Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, northwest Iran and in the Assyrian diaspora. The Judeo-Aramaic languages are now mostly spoken in Israel, and most are facing extinction. The Jewish varieties that have come from communities that once lived between Lake Urmia and Mosul are not all mutually intelligible. In some places, for example Urmia, Assyrian Christians