Overview
Syrians are the native inhabitants of Syria, most of whom have Arabic in its Levantine dialect as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of Syria is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the centuries after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic gradually became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.