[6][7][8] The various NENA dialects descend from Old Aramaic, the lingua franca in the later phase of the Assyrian Empire, which slowly displaced the East Semitic Akkadian language beginning around the 10th century BC.

[17] Suret is mutually intelligible with some NENA dialects spoken by Jews, especially in the western part of its historical extent.

[24] However, emigration has also had another effect: the language has gained more global attention, with several initiatives to digitize and preserve it, and the number of people learning Syriac is considerably higher than before.

[28] The converging process that took place between Assyrian Akkadian and Aramaic across all aspects of both languages and societies is known as Aramaic-Assyrian symbiosis.

[33] By the 1st century AD, Akkadian was extinct, though vocabulary and grammatical features still survive in modern NENA dialects.

Much literary effort was put into the production of an authoritative translation of the Bible into Syriac, the Peshitta (ܦܫܝܛܬܐ, Pšīṭtā).

Syriac was the common tongue of the region, where it was the native language of the Fertile Crescent, surrounding areas, as well as in parts of Eastern Arabia.

Although remaining a single language with a high level of comprehension between the varieties, the two employ distinctive variations in pronunciation and writing systems and, to a lesser degree, in vocabulary and grammar.

[9][10] The Mongol invasions of the Levant in the 13th century and the religiously motivated massacres of Assyrians by Timur further contributed to the rapid decline of the language.

[4][3] The original Mesopotamian writing system, believed to be the world's oldest, was derived around 3600 BC from this method of keeping accounts.

By the end of the 4th millennium BC, the Mesopotamians were using a triangular-shaped stylus made from a reed pressed into soft clay to record numbers.

[46] The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā (ܐܣܛܪܢܓܠܐ); the name is thought to derive from the Greek adjective στρογγύλη (strongúlē) 'round'.

ʾĀlep̄ (ܐ), the first letter, represents a glottal stop, but it can also indicate the presence of certain vowels (typically at the beginning or the end of a word, but also in the middle).

A precise transcription may not be necessary for native Suret speakers, as they would be able to pronounce words correctly, but it can be very helpful for those not quite familiar with Syriac and more informed with the Latin script.

The following are periphrastic ways to express possession, using the word betā ("house") as a base (in Urmian/Iraqi Koine): Hakkari dialects are generally stress-timed, whereas the Urmian and Iraqi Koine dialects may be more syllable-timed: Although Suret, like all Semitic languages, is not a tonal language, a tonal stress is made on a plural possessive suffix -éh (i.e. dīyéh; "their") in the final vowel to tonally differentiate it from an unstressed -eh (i.e. dīyeh; "his"), which is a masculine singular possessive, with a standard stress pattern falling on the penult.

The -eh used to denote a singular third person masculine possessive (e.g. bābeh, "his father"; aqleh, "his leg") is present in most of the traditional dialects in Hakkari and Nineveh Plains, but not for Urmian and some Iraqi Koine speakers, who instead use -ū for possessive "his" (e.g. bābū, "his father"; aqlū, "his leg"), whilst retaining the stress in -éh for "their".

Beginning even in the Classical Syriac era, when the prefixed preposition "d-" came into more popular use and replaced state Morphology for marking possession, the emphatic (definite) form of the word became dominant and the definite sense of the word merged with the indefinite sense so that pālāxā became "a/the (male) worker" and pālaxtā became "a/the (female) worker."

Such construction is present in Kurdish, where it is frequently combined with the locative element "in, with", which is akin to the preposition bi- preceding the infinitive in Suret (as in "bi-ktawen" meaning 'I'm writing').

[89] Unique among the Semitic languages, the development of ergativity in Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects involved the departure of original Aramaic tensed finite verbal forms.

[93] Due to geographical proximity,[94] Suret has an extensive number of Iranian loanwords–namely Persian and Kurdish–incorporated in its vocabulary, as well as some Arabic, Russian, Azeri and Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly within the last century, English loanwords.

Several of these words are not attested in Classical Edessan Syriac, many of them being agricultural terms, being more likely to survive by being spoken in agrarian rural communities rather than the urban centres like Edessa.

Koine is more analogous or similar to Urmian in terms of manner of articulation, place of articulation and its consonant cluster formations than it is to the Hakkari dialects, though it just lacks the regional Persian influence in some consonants and vowels, as the front vowels in Urmian tend to be more fronted and the back ones more rounded.

Iraqi Koine was developed in the urban areas of Iraq (i.e. Baghdad, Basra, Habbaniyah and Kirkuk), which became the meccas for the rural Assyrian population.

This is attributed to the growing exposure to Assyrian Standard-based literature, media and its use as a liturgical language by the Church of the East, which is based in Iraq.

[66] Neo-Aramaic has a rather slightly defined dialect continuum, starting from the Assyrians in northern Iraq (e.g. Alqosh, Batnaya) and ending with those in Western Iran (Urmia).

[100] Nearing the Iraqi-Turkey border, the Barwari and Tyari dialects are more "traditionally Assyrian" and would sound like those in the Hakkari province in Turkey.

Gawar, Diz and Jilu are in the "centre" of the spectrum, which lie halfway between Tyari and Urmia, having features of both respective dialects, though still being distinct in their own manner.

The emergence of spoken Neo-Aramaic is conventionally dated to the 13th century, but a number of authors continued producing literary works in Syriac in the later medieval period.

The Urmia Bible, published in 1852 by Justin Perkins was based on the Peshitta, where it included a parallel translation in the Urmian dialect.

The comparative ease of modern publishing methods has encouraged other colloquial Neo-Aramaic languages, like Turoyo, to begin to produce literature.