Ariel Nosrat was born in Tehran to a Jewish family with origins in the towns of Tekab and Bijar in today’s Iranian province of Kurdistan. NeoAramaic is his mother tongue as it was the spoken language at home and in his immediate community. In addition to NeoAramaic, Ariel speaks English, Hebrew, Persian, French and Dutch.
After completing school, Ariel moved to the UK, where he did undergraduate and graduate studies in engineering and worked in the field of management. He moved to the Netherlands in 1985 and then to Israel in 1988 and has lived in Jerusalem since. In recent years, he has been assisting non-profit organizations in their pursuit of operational effectiveness.
Painfully aware that the NeoAramaic language is severely endangered, a fact substantiated by the UNESCO Atlas of endangered languages, Ariel helped to found the Lishana Institute – a non-profit organization with the distinct mission to preserve the NeoAramaic language and culture.
Jewish Neo-Aramaic is an extension of the ancient Aramaic language, and is currently spoken by Jewish individuals originating from the Kurdish region in the Middle East. The language is typically divided into dialects such as Lishana Noshan (from the town of Tekab, Iran), Lishana Deni (from Zakho, Iraq), and Lishan Didan (Urmia, Iran). Most Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jews emigrated to Israel in the 1950s-1970s, and their language was superseded by Hebrew. Now, the language is nearly extinct, with an estimated 500 elderly speakers, mostly in Israel.
Ariel Nosrat lives in Israel, and as a speaker of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, he helped establish the Lishana Institute — a non-profit organization with the distinct mission to preserve the Jewish Neo-Aramaic language and culture. For this project, Ariel will work with speakers of the different dialects to develop an online dictionary, with the goal of producing 2,000 entries across 3 dialects. This dictionary will be hosted on the Living Dictionaries platform, and it will feature audio recordings of each entry as read by native speakers as well as idioms and classical Aramaic translations.
Wikitongues Fellows are bold, community-rooted leaders driving the future of their languages. Through a year-long accelerator, they receive funding, hands-on technical training, and strategic mentorship to launch and scale projects in documentation, education, lexicography, media, and Wikimedia platforms. Each Fellow joins a global cohort of language activists who share tools, experiments, and hard-won lessons, transforming local initiatives into sustainable movements. The result is practical, community-owned work that keeps languages spoken, taught, recorded, and alive for generations.
