Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia, a dialect of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, was originally spoken by Jews in Urmia and surrounding areas of Iranian Azerbaijan from Salmas to Solduz and into what is now Yüksekova, Hakkâri and Başkale, Van Province in eastern Turkey.

[3] Lishan Didan (pronunciation: [li:ˈʃan di:ˈdan]) literally translates to "our language" (morphological gloss: tongue-∅ GEN.1PL.EX).

[3] Similarly, speakers of the language often refer to themselves/their community as "Nash Didan" (pronunciation: naʃ di:ˈdan), meaning "our people.

This is in reference to the Nash Didan identity closely aligning with the long history of Aramaic Targum in Judaism.

In addition to speaking a variety of Aramaic, Nash Didan have religious practices such as maintaining of the custom of meturgeman (targumic recitation: public recitation of a translation of the weekly Torah Reading into vernacular Aramaic) in the synagogue, and the age-old practice of using targumim to teach Biblical Hebrew.

Due largely to these pracitces, some Nash Didan Jews had such a solid foundation of the Hebrew Language, they did not require ulpan classes upon immigration to Israel.

[6] The southern cluster of dialects was focused on the town of Mahabad and villages just south of Lake Urmia.

According to Nash Didan tradition, the Jewish community of Urmia dates back to the Babylonian Exile, when they were forcibly relocated from The Kingdom of Judah to Mesopotamia.

This tradition further dictates that Nash Didan Jews did not return to Israel after the declaration issued by the emperor Cyrus II of Persia, after he conquered the region and ushered in the Second Temple period.

Sometime in the 1900s, a decision was to restore and renovate the synagogue, resulting in new paint covering the Hebrew and Aramaic calligraphy on the walls.

The Ottoman and Persian Empires often used tensions between Assyrians, Azeris, Kurds, and Armenians to fight proxy wars in the region.

By 1918, due to the assassination of Shimun XIX Benyamin, Patriarch of the Church of the East as part of the Assyrian Genocide, and the invasion of the Ottoman forces, many Jews were uprooted from their homes and fled.

The upheavals in their traditional region after World War I and the founding of the State of Israel led most Nash Didan to settle near Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and small villages in various parts of the country.

[9] Due to persecution and relocation, Neo-Aramaic began to be replaced by the speech of younger generations by Modern Hebrew.

Others stayed in Iran until after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, eventually moving to New York, Los Angeles, and other places in the United States, joining existing Persian Jewish communities.

[10] While most native speakers are in Israel, the use of Lishan Didan in the United States is comparatively strong since many of them left Iran at least 30 years later.

The Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages offers a class on a different dialect, but will maybe one day include Lishan Didan.

The rabbis would travel around Kurdistan to set up and maintain yeshivas in the towns of Barzan, Aqra, Mosul, and Amediya.

Much literature (commentaries on religious text, poetry, prayers, ritual instructions) has been compiled and published by the members of the Barzani family and their community.

[14] However, the local Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects of Suret Neo-Aramaic are only mildly mutually intelligible: Christian and Jewish communities living side by side developed completely different variants of Aramaic that had more in common with their coreligionists living further away than with their neighbors.

Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties were by-and-large more similar to each other than to the dialects of their Christian neighbors, but there may be evidence for a small amount of sprachbrunding.

It was generally far more likely for Jews to assimilate into Assyrian communities than vice versa, but the effect it had via language contact is unclear.

On a lingusitic level, Jewish languages often persist as a means of identity marking though Situational code-switching, and as such often develop in ways that intentionally stymy mutual intelligibility.

An Assyrian community settled in Urmia after the local Kurds and Turkish army forced them to flee their homes.

The following displays examples of divergence in phonology, morphology, and lexicon between the Jewish and Assyrian Urmia dialects.

ך (ךֿ) ף ףֿ 1The letter Bet when spirantized (בֿ) is sometimes preserved when the author is familiar with the archaic spelling, especially if it is in a word that is from Biblical Hebrew (for example, the name יוכבד).

For example, the word bela [belɑ] meaning "house" was originally betha [beθɑ]; it is now written בֵילָא (compare to Hebrew cognate bayit / בית).

If it were not, the phonological rules of the language would enforce a pronunciation of [ma:ˈlax], including a lengthened vowel preceding the stressed syllable.

[16] Urmia, like other Neo-Aramaic dialects, exhibits complex verbal morphology that allows for fine-grained expression of mood, tense, and aspect.