ABSTRACT
Mandaic is the language of the Mandæan community, which was formerly based in Iraq and Iran but is distributed throughout the world, principally in Europe, Australia and North America, as the result of ethnic cleansing in its homeland. Despite its long history of attestation and copious literature, it is moribund. Mandaic is the only known literary dialect of Aramaic to survive in vernacular usage. At first glance, its vernacular form appears to differ considerably from its literary form, primarily as a result of contact with neighboring languages, namely Arabic and Persian. The corpus of Mandaic texts available to scholars has grown considerably over the last century, particularly with regard to the spoken language. When writing Mandaic and occasionally Arabic, the Mandæans of Iraq and Iran employ a cursive and ligatured script unique to their community. Prior to 1963, scholars regularly transliterated Mandaic as if it were a pure abjad.
