Урмиялық еврейлердің жаңа арамей диалектісі

Neo Aramaic dialect of Jews in 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. Most speakers now live in Israel.

Various Neo Aramaic dialects were spoken across a wide area from Lake Urmia to Lake Van (in Turkey), down to the plain of Mosul (in Iraq) and back across to Sanandaj (in Iran again). There are two major dialect clusters of Urmi Jewish Neo Aramaic. The northern cluster of dialects centered on Urmia and Salmas in West Azerbaijan province of Iran, and extended into the Jewish villages of Van Province, Turkey. The southern cluster of dialects was focused on the town of Mahabad and villages just south of Lake Urmia. The dialects of the two clusters are intelligible to one another, and most of the differences are due to receiving loanwords from different languages: Standard Persian, Kurdish and Turkish languages especially. Many of the Jews of Urmia worked as peddlers in the cloth trade, while others were jewelers or goldsmiths. The degree of education for the boys was primary school, with only some advancing their Jewish schooling in a Talmud yeshiva. Some of these students earned their livelihood by making talismans and amulets. There was a small girls school with only twenty pupils. There were two main synagogues in Urmia, one large one and one smaller one. The large synagogue was called the synagogue of Sheikh Abdulla. By 1918, due to the assassination of Shimun XIX Benyamin, Patriarch of the Church of the East as part of the Armenian Genocide, and the invasion of the Ottoman forces, many Jews were uprooted from their homes and fled. The Jews settled in Tbilisi or much later emigrated to Israel. The upheavals in their traditional region after World War I and the founding of the State of Israel led most Azerbaijani Jews to settle in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and small villages in various parts of the country. The language faces extinction in the next few decades. There are also a dwindling number of speakers scattered across the United States, as well as a handful in Tehran.

Urmi Neo Aramaic, at the northeastern extreme end of this area, is somewhat intelligible with Trans Zab Jewish Neo Aramaic (spoken further south, in Iranian Kurdistan) and Inter Zab Jewish Neo Aramaic (formerly spoken around Kirkuk, Iraq). 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. The topography in many of the dialects of Neo Aramaic is so distinct that small villages, (like the town of Arodhin which consisted of two Jewish families), had their own dialect. Ancient AramaicA. A. pronunciationZāxōDehōkʿAmadiyaUrmiaIrbilידאֿ "hand"ʾ īḏaʾ īzaʾ īḏaʾ īdaīdaīlaביתאֿ "house"bēṯabēsabēṯabēṯabēlabēla