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.

Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Arab identity became dominant and the ethnonym "Syrian" was used mainly by Christians who spoke Syriac.

The term gained more importance during the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, becoming the accepted national name for the Arabic speakers of the Syrian Republic.

In 2018, Syria had an estimated population of 19.5 million, which includes, aside from the aforementioned majority, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Armenians and others.

Even before the Syrian Civil War, there was quite a large Syrian diaspora that had emigrated to North America (United States and Canada), European Union member states (including Sweden, France, and Germany), South America (mainly in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile), the West Indies,[59] Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

[60] Six million refugees of the Syrian Civil War also live outside Syria now, mostly in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Germany as well as Sweden.

[66] In one instance, the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt applied the term "Syrian Village" as the name of a settlement in Fayoum.

[71] In his book The Great Roman-Jewish War, Josephus, a Hebrew native to the Levant, mentioned the Syrians as the non-Hebrew, non-Greek indigenous inhabitants of Syria.

The idioms Syrian and Greek were used by Rome to denote civic societies instead of separate ethnic groups.

[78] The presence of Arabs in Syria is recorded since the 9th century BC,[80] and Roman period historians, such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Ptolemy, reported that Arabs inhabited many parts of Syria,[81] which according to modern historians indicate either an ethnic group or a nomadic way of life.

[note 2][82][83] The urheimat of the Arab ethnos is unclear; the traditional 19th century theory locates this in the Arabian Peninsula,[84] while some modern scholars, such as David Frank Graf, note that the epigraphic and archaeological evidence render the traditional theory inadequate to explain the Arabs' appearance in Syria.

[note 3][86] The Arabs mentioned in Syria by Greco-Roman writers were assimilated into the newly formed "Greco–Aramaean culture" that dominated the region, and the texts they produced were written in Greek and Aramaic.

[90] On the eve of the Rashidun Caliphate conquest of the Levant, 634 AD, Syria's population mainly spoke Aramaic as the Lingua franca,[91] while Greek was the language of administration.

The Abbasids in the eighth and ninth centuries sought to integrate the peoples under their authority, and the Arabization of the administration was one of their methods.

[99] Many historians, such as Claude Cahen and Bernard Hamilton, proposed that the Arabization of Christians was completed before the First Crusade.

[109] Already in the 1830s, the Lebanese traveler As’ad Khayyat identified with the term Syria, but it took till the 1880s for the name to begin to be widely used by the inhabitants to refer to themselves.

[109] The spread of the Syrian "idea" amongst the Muslims can be traced to the efforts of Rashid Rida who contributed to the formulation of the Syrian Union Party's manifesto in 1918, demanding that Syria, in the aftermath of World War I and the Ottoman withdrawal from the region, become an independent state and not part of larger Arab one ruled by the Hashemites of the Kingdom of Hejaz.

His entry ignited the Syrian national consciousness after he declared an Arab government in the Levant centred in Damascus with him as prince.

[121][122] The paternal Y-DNA haplogroup J1, which reaches its highest frequencies in Yemen 72.6% and Qatar 58.3%, accounted for 33.6% of Syrians.

[57][124] The Syrians are closest to other Levantine populations: the Lebanese, the Palestinians and Jordanians;[125] this closeness can be explained by the common Canaanite ancestry and geographical unity which was broken only in the twentieth century with the advent of British and French mandates.

[134] Apparently, the cultural influence of Arabian expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean in the seventh century was more prominent than the genetic influx.

[140][141] The Druze are a mountainous people who reside in Jabal al-Druze who helped spark the Great Syrian Revolt.