How an 11-Year-Old Learned a Dying Language: Lishan Didan with Sam Miller

Sarah Bunin Benor interviews Sam Miller, a computational linguist of mixed Ashkenazi and Nash-Didan heritage. Sam details his maternal roots in the cosmopolitan city of Urmia, Iran, where his family navigated a multilingual world of Aramaic, Farsi, and Kurdish. Driven by a childhood desire to shoulder the “burden” of his endangered ancestral language, he discusses his documentation work with the Jewish Language Project. Sam highlights Nash-Didan heritage words for traditional foods like shifteh and tava, and shares creative revitalization projects, including a Lishan Didan cover of “Country Roads.”

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Sam (Shmuzl-Shim’on) Miller is a half-Ashkenazi, half-Nash Didan computational linguist. He is one of the last speakers of Lishan Didan (Jewish Neo-Aramaic). He works on documenting and preserving the language with the Jewish Language Project through various documentation and language advocacy efforts.