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

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

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

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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.”


Heritage Words - conversations about the words we inherit and the meaning they bring to our lives - is produced by the HUC Jewish Language Project and HUC Connect.

Host and producer: Sarah Bunin Benor

Assistant producer: Kyle Elbaz Fingerhut

Editor: Avishay Artsy

Video editor: Talia Ehrenberg

Theme music: Maurice El Medioni’s French and Algerian Judeo-Arabic album “Cafe Oran,” featuring the Klezmatics’ David Krakauer and Frank London, courtesy of Piranha Records.

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