Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) is a grouping of related dialects of
Neo-Aramaic spoken before
World War I as a vernacular language by Jews and
Assyrian Christians between the
Tigris and
Lake Urmia, stretching north to
Lake Van and southwards to
Mosul and
Kirkuk. As a result of the
Assyrian genocide, Christian speakers were forced out of the area that is now Turkey and in the early 1950s most
Jewish speakers moved to Israel. The
Kurdish-Turkish conflict resulted in further dislocations of speaker populations.[1][2] As of the 1990s, the NENA group had an estimated number of fluent speakers among the
Assyrians just below 500,000, spread throughout the Middle East and the
Assyrian diaspora. In 2007, linguist
Geoffrey Khan wrote that many dialects were nearing extinction with fluent speakers difficult to find.[1]
The NENA languages contain a large number of loanwords and some grammatical features from the extinct
East SemiticAkkadian language of
Mesopotamia (the original language of the Assyrians) and also in more modern times from their surrounding languages:
Kurdish,
Arabic,
Persian,
Azerbaijani and
Turkish language. These languages are spoken by both Jews and Christian Assyrians from the area. Each variety of NENA is clearly Jewish or Assyrian.
However, not all varieties of one or other religious groups are intelligible with all others of the group. Likewise, in some places Jews and Assyrian Christians from the same locale speak mutually unintelligible varieties of Aramaic, where in other places their language is quite similar. The differences can be explained by the fact that NENA communities gradually became isolated into small groups spread over a wide area, and some had to be highly mobile due to various ethnic and religious persecutions.
The influence of classical Aramaic varieties –
Syriac on Christian varieties and
Targumic on Jewish communities – gives a dual heritage that further distinguishes language by faith. Many of the Jewish speakers of NENA varieties, the
Kurdish Jews, now live in
Israel, where Neo-Aramaic is
endangered by the dominance of
Modern Hebrew. Many Christian NENA speakers, who usually are
Assyrian, are in
diaspora in
North America,
Europe,
Australia, the
Caucasus and elsewhere, although indigenous communities remain in northern
Iraq, south east
Turkey, north east
Syria and north west
Iran, an area roughly comprising what had been ancient
Assyria.[4]
^
abcKhan, G. (1 January 2007). "The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Dialects". Journal of Semitic Studies. 52 (1): 1–20.
doi:
10.1093/jss/fgl034.
^Bird, Isabella, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, including a summer in the Upper Karun region and a visit to the Nestorian rayahs, London: J. Murray, 1891, vol. ii, pp. 282 and 306
^Lewis, M. Paul; Gary F. Simons; Charles D. Fennig, eds. (2015).
"Assyrian Neo-Aramaic". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (18th ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
Coghill, Eleanor. "Some notable features in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects of Iraq". Neo-Aramaic Dialect Studies. Gorgias Press. pp. 91–104.
ISBN978-1-4632-1161-5.
Fox, Samuel Ethan (2008). "North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic and the Middle Aramaic Dialects". Neo-Aramaic Dialect Studies. Gorgias Press. pp. 1–18.
ISBN978-1-4632-1161-5.
Khan, Geoffrey (2007). "Grammatical borrowing in North-eastern Neo-Aramaic". Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 197–214.
doi:
10.1515/9783110199192.197.
ISBN978-3-11-019919-2.
Khan, Geoffrey (2012). "North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic". The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 708–724.
ISBN978-3-11-025158-6.
Khan, Geoffrey; Napiorkowska, Lidia, eds. (2015). Neo-Aramaic in Its Linguistic Context. Gorgias Press.
ISBN978-1-4632-0410-5.
Khan, Geoffrey (2020). "The Perfect in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic". Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISBN978-90-272-6090-1.
Ragagnin, Elisabetta (2020). "Some Notes on Turkic and Mongolic Elements in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Varieties". Eine hundertblättrige Tulpe - Bir ṣadbarg lāla. De Gruyter. pp. 361–371.
ISBN978-3-11-220924-0.
Mutzafi, Hezy (2006). "On the Etymology of Some Enigmatic Words in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic". Aramaic Studies. 4 (1): 83–99.
doi:
10.1177/1477835106066037.