Ash dangled precariously from Iosif Skordis' cigarette as he reminisced with fellow villagers in a language on the edge of extinction, one that partly traces its roots to the language Jesus Christ once spoke.

The 97-year-old Skordis is one of only 900 people in the world who speak Cypriot Maronite Arabic, or Sanna. Today, his village of Kormakitis is the last bastion of a language once spoken by tens of thousands of people across dozens of villages.