The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.

The detailed study of a rare Neo-Aramaic variety from north-eastern Iraq offered by Lidia Napiorkowska in A Grammar of the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw is a contribution to the documentation of the endangered world of spoken Aramaic. The comparative and contact-sensitive approach of the monograph situates the dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw in a wider context of Semitic languages on the one hand, and of the local varieties of Iraqi Kurdistan on the other. Next to a systematic account of phonology and morphology, the book covers a range of syntactic features and is accompanied by a corpus of translated texts and a glossary, arranged according to the Aramaic, as well as English entries.

Containing a detailed grammatical description of the spoken Aramaic dialect of the Christian community in the town of Qaraqosh, which lies on the Mosul plain in Northern Iraq, this volume also includes a transcription of oral texts recorded in the dialect. The grammar is based on extensive fieldwork carried out among native speakers. It consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax. There is also a study of semantic fields in the lexicon of the dialect and full glossaries of lexical items. This Aramaic dialect has never been described before. It is one of the most archaic dialects in group known as North Eastern Neo-Aramaic that contains many features that have not been found in other dialects. These include several lexical elements that are not found in earlier literary Aramaic but can be traced back to Akkadian and Sumerian. Knowledge of the dialect is now being lost among the younger generations, so this volume is an important linguistic record.

Neo-Mandaic is the last phase of a pre-modern vernacular closely related to Classical Mandaic, a Mesopotamian Aramaic idiom of Late Antiquity. This unique language is critically endangered, being spoken by a few hundred adherents of Mandaeism, the only gnostic religion to have survived until the present day. All other Mandaeans, numbering several tens of thousands, are Arabic or Persian speakers. The present study concerns the least known aspect of the language, namely its lexicon as reflected in both its dialects, those of the cities of Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in the Iranian province of Khuzestan. Apart from lexicological and etymological studies in Neo-Mandaic itself, the book discusses the contribution of the Neo-Mandaic lexis to our knowledge of literary Mandaic as well as aspects of this lexis within the framework of Neo-Aramaic as a whole.

This work is a detailed documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect spoken by Assyrian Christians in the region of Urmi (northwestern-Iran). It consists of four volumes. Volumes 1 and 2 are descriptions of the grammar of the dialect, including the phonology, morphology and syntax. Volume 3 contains a study of the lexicon, consisting of a series of lists of words in various lexical fields and a full dictionary with etymologies. Volume 4 contains transcriptions and translations of oral texts, including folktales and descriptions of culture and history. The Urmi dialect is the most important dialect among the Assyrian Christian communities, since it forms the basis of a widely-used literary form of Neo-Aramaic.

Contains a collection of papers on various aspects of the grammar of Neo-Aramaic, with special attention to the North Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialect group. This title features papers that include descriptions of many hitherto undescribed dialects, including those of Tyare, Sat, Calla, Barwar, Karamlesh, Telkepe, Peshabur and those of the Aqra region.