Syrian diaspora refers to Syrian people and their descendants who chose or were forced to emigrate from Syria and now reside in other countries as immigrants, or as refugees of the Syrian Civil War.
Syrian baklava maker in Little Syria in 1916.
Syrian immigrant children on Washington Street in Lower Manhattan in 1916.
Syrian folk group in Brazil.
Two Syrian women in NYC, 1916.
Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, who have Arabic, especially its Levantine dialect, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people 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 became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic (Syriac), which is still spoken in its Eastern and Western dialects.
Tabbouleh