Assyrian Neo-Aramaic


Assyrian Neo-Aramaic or simply Assyrian, also known as Syriac, Eastern Syriac and Neo-Syriac, is an Aramaic language within the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family that is spoken by the Assyrian people. The various Assyrian 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. They have been further heavily influenced by Classical Syriac, the Middle Aramaic dialect of Edessa, after its adoption as an official liturgical language of the Syriac churches.
Assyrian-speakers are native to Upper Mesopotamia, Iranian Azerbaijan, southeastern Anatolia and the northeastern Levant, which is a large region stretching from the plain of Urmia in northwestern Iran through to the Erbil, Kirkuk and Duhok regions in northern Iraq, together with the northern regions of Syria and to southcentral and southeastern Turkey. Instability throughout the Middle East over the past century has led to a worldwide diaspora of Assyrian speakers, with most speakers now living abroad in such places as North and South America, Australia, Europe and Russia. Speakers of Assyrian and Turoyo are ethnic Assyrians and are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
Assyrian Aramaic is to a moderate degree, intelligible with Senaya, Lishana Deni, Bohtan Neo-Aramaic which are at times, also considered to be dialects of Assyrian. A similar circumstance exists with Lishan Didan, Hulaulá and Lishanid Noshan. Its mutual intelligibility with Turoyo is partial and asymmetrical, but more significant in written form.
Chaldean is not considered its own independent language from Assyrian; rather, the separation of the two is a designation created by SIL on non-linguistic grounds, rendering 'Chaldean' and 'Assyrian' as dialects of 'Suret'. Assyrian is the largest extant Syrian-Aramaic language, with Turoyo making up most of the remaining Syrian-Aramaic speakers. Both however, evolved from Middle Syrian-Aramaic which was, along with Latin and Greek, one of "the three most important Christian languages in the early centuries" of the Common Era.
Assyrian is a moderately-inflected, fusional language with a two-gender noun system and rather flexible word order. There is some Akkadian influence on the language. In its native region, speakers may use Iranian, Turkic and Arabic loanwords, while diaspora communities may use loanwords borrowed from the languages of their respective countries. Assyrian is written from right-to-left and it uses the Madnḥāyā version of the Syriac alphabet. Assyrian, alongside other modern Aramaic languages, is now considered endangered, as newer generation of Assyrians tend to not acquire the full language, mainly due to emigration and acculturation into their new resident countries.

History

and Syrian-Aramaic have been in extensive contact since their old periods. Local unwritten Syrian-Aramaic dialects emerged from Imperial Aramaic in Assyria. In around 700 BC, Syrian-Aramaic slowly started to replace Akkadian in Assyria, Babylonia and the Levant. Widespread bilingualism among Assyrian nationals was already present prior to the fall of the Empire. The language transition was achievable because the two languages featured similarities in grammar and vocabulary, and because the 22-lettered Aramaic alphabet was simpler to learn than the Akkadian cuneiform which had over 600 signs. 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.
Introduced as the official language of the Assyrian Empire by Tiglath-Pileser III, it became the language of commerce and trade, the vernacular language of Assyria in the late Iron Age and classical antiquity, and the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, the Parthian Empire and the Sasanian Empire. Following the Achaemenid conquest of Assyria under Darius I, the Syrian-Aramaic language was adopted as the "vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages". After the conquest of Assyria by the Seleucid Empire in the late 4th century BC, Imperial Aramaic gradually lost its status as an imperial language, but continued to flourish alongside Ancient Greek.
, written in Serto script.
By the 1st century AD, Akkadian was extinct, though vocabulary and grammatical features still survive in modern Assyrian. The Neo-Aramaic languages evolved from Middle Syrian-Aramaic by the 13th century. There is evidence that the drive for the adoption of Syriac was led by missionaries. Much literary effort was put into the production of an authoritative translation of the Bible into Syriac, the Peshitta. At the same time, Ephrem the Syrian was producing the most treasured collection of poetry and theology in the Classical Syriac language.
By the 3rd century AD, churches in Urhay in the kingdom of Osroene began to use Classical Syriac as the language of worship and it became the literary and liturgical language of many churches in the Fertile Crescent. 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. It was the dominant language until 900 AD, till it was supplanted by Greek and later Arabic in a centuries-long process having begun in the Arab conquests.
region of Iran.
The differences with the Church of the East led to the bitter Nestorian schism in the Syriac-speaking world. As a result of the schism as well as being split between living in the Byzantine Empire in the west and the Sasanian Empire in the east, Syrian-Aramaic developed distinctive Western and Eastern varieties. 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. During the course of the third and fourth centuries AD, the inhabitants of the region began to embrace Christianity. Because of theological differences, Syriac-speaking Christians bifurcated during the 5th century into the Church of the East, or East Syrians under Sasanian rule, and the Syriac Orthodox, or West Syrians under the Byzantine empire. After this separation, the two groups developed distinct dialects differing primarily in the pronunciation and written symbolisation of vowels.
, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic is mainly spoken in the Nineveh plains and the cities around Mosul, Duhok, Erbil and Kirkuk.
The Mongol invasions of the 13th century and the religiously motivated massacres of Assyrians by Tamurlane further contributed to the rapid decline of the language. In many places outside of northern Mesopotamia, even in liturgy, the language was replaced by Arabic. "Modern Syriac Aramaic" is a term occasionally used to refer to the modern Neo-Aramaic languages, including Assyrian. Even if they cannot be positively identified as the direct descendants of attested Middle Syriac, they must have developed from closely related dialects belonging to the same branch of Aramaic, and the varieties spoken in Christian communities have long co-existed with and been influenced by Middle Syriac as a liturgical and literary language. Moreover, the name "Syriac", when used with no qualification, generally refers to one specific dialect of Middle Aramaic but not to Old Aramaic or to the various present-day Eastern and Central Neo-Aramaic languages descended from it or from close relatives.
In 2004, the Constitution of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region recognised Syriac in article 7, section four, stating, "Syriac shall be the language of education and culture for those who speak it in addition to the Kurdish language." In 2005, the Iraqi constitution recognised it as one of the "official languages in the administrative units in which they constitute density of population" in article 4, section four.

Script

History

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. Around 2700 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian, a language isolate genetically unrelated to the Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages that it neighboured. About that time, Mesopotamian cuneiform became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables and numbers. This script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic Akkadian around 2600 BC.
With the adoption of Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Old Aramaic was also adapted to Mesopotamian cuneiform. The last cuneiform scripts in Akkadian discovered thus far date from the 1st century AD. Various bronze lion-weights found in Nineveh featured both the Akkadian and Aramaic text etched on them, bearing the names of Assyrian kings, such as Shalmaneser III, King Sargon and Sennacherib. Indication of contemporaneous existence of the two languages in 4th century B.C. is present in an Aramaic document from Uruk written in cuneiform. In Babylon, Akkadian writing vanished by 140 B.C, with the exclusion of a few priests who used it for religious matters. Though it still continued to be employed for astronomical texts up until the common era.
The Syriac script is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian alphabets. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants. It is a cursive script where some, but not all, letters connect within a word. Aramaic writing has been found as far north as Hadrians Wall in Ancient Britain, in the form of inscriptions in Aramaic, made by Assyrian soldiers serving in the Roman Legions in northern England during the 2ndcentury AD.

Modern development

The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā ; the name is thought to derive from the Greek adjective στρογγύλη 'round'. Although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has undergone some revival since the 10th century.
When Arabic gradually began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent after the 7th century AD, texts were often written in Arabic with the Syriac script. Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. Such non-Syriac languages written in Syriac script are called Garshuni or Karshuni.
The Madnhāyā, or 'eastern', version formed as a form of shorthand developed from ʾEsṭrangēlā and progressed further as handwriting patterns changed. The Madnhāyā version also possesses optional vowel markings to help pronounce Syriac. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, 'conversational', often translated as "contemporary", reflecting its use in writing modern Neo-Aramaic.

Letters

Three letters act as matres lectionis: rather than being a consonant, they indicate a vowel. ʾĀlep̄, the first letter, represents a glottal stop, but it can also indicate the presence of certain vowels. The letter Waw from rūkkāḵā, 'soft' letters). The letters Bēṯ, Gāmal, Dālaṯ, Kāp̄, Pē and Taw, all plosives, are able to be spirantised into fricatives.
The system involves placing a single dot underneath the letter to give its 'soft' variant and a dot above the letter to give its 'hard' variant.

Latin alphabet

In the 1930s, following the state policy for minority languages of the Soviet Union, a Latin alphabet was developed and some material published. Despite the fact that this innovation did not displace the Syriac script, the usage of the Latin script in the Assyrian community has become rather widespread due to the Assyrian diaspora's settlement mostly being in Europe and the anglophone, where the Latin script dominates. The Latin alphabet is preferred by most Assyrians for practical reasons and its convenience, especially in social media, where it is used to communicate. Although the Syriac Latin alphabet contains diacritics, most Assyrians rarely utilise the modified letters and would conveniently rely on the basic Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet is also a useful tool to present Assyrian terminology to anyone who is not familiar with the Syriac script. A precise transcription may not be necessary for native Assyrian 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.

Phonology

Consonants

Notes:
According to linguist Edward Odisho, there are six vowel phonemes in Iraqi Koine. They are as follows:
East Syriac dialects may recognize half-close sounds as and also recognize the back vowel as a long form of.
Two basic diphthongs exist, namely and. For some words, many dialects have monophthongised them to and respectively. For substantives, A common vowel alteration in Assyrian is apophonically shifting the final -a to -e, so ṭera will be ṭere in its plural form.

Phonetics of Iraqi Koine

Iraqi Koine is a merged dialect which formed in the mid-20th century, being influenced by both Urmian and Hakkari dialects.
Modern Assyrian is a null-subject language with both ergative morphology and a nominative-accusative system, and also features pronoun drop to a significant degree. Like English and modern Hebrew, Assyrian largely lacks grammatical cases, with prepositions and prepositional prefixes largely taking on the role cases would otherwise. The Semitic genitive, which a noun is possessed or modified by another noun or noun phrase, is expressed morphologically by the genitive morpheme d-, indicating possession.
Gemination occurs in the language, as heard in words like libbā and šmayyā. Even though subject–verb–object is the default sentence structure of Syriac, subject–object–verb, verb–subject–object, verb–object–subject, object–verb–subject and object–subject–verb are also possible word orders in modern Assyrian, namely due to inversion taking place, thus making Assyrian Neo-Aramaic a flexible language, akin to Latin and Greek.
Due to language contact, Assyrian may share similar grammatical features with Persian and Kurdish in the way they employ the negative copula in its full form before the verbal constituent and also with the negated forms of the present perfect. As a central Semitic language, Assyrian is closely related to Hebrew, Arabic, Western Neo-Aramaic and Mandaic and bears a relatively similar grammatical style to these languages.

Personal pronouns

In Assyrian, personal pronouns have seven forms. In singular forms, the 2nd and 3rd have separate masculine and feminine forms, while the 1st do not. The plural forms also lack gender distinction.
numberpersonsubject pronounobject pronoun
singular1st personānā li
singular2nd person āt, āti or āten lux
singular2nd person āti or āten lex or lāx
singular3rd person āw leh
singular3rd person āy lāh
plural1st personaxnan or axni lan
plural2nd personaxtun or axtoxun loxun
plural3rd personāni lhon or lehe

Like all Semitic languages and the unrelated Insular Celtic languages, Assyrian uses inflected prepositions when it comes to personal pronouns – the preposition āl inflects as ālli.

Nouns

Nouns carry grammatical gender. They can be either singular or plural in number. Almost all singular substantives are suffixed with -ā in their lemma form, the main exception being foreign words, which do not always take the suffix. The three grammatical states present in Classical Syriac are no longer productive, only being used in a few set terms and phrases, with the emphatic state becoming the ordinary form of the noun. Adjectives always agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify.
In Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, most genitive relationships are built using the relative particle d-, used in the same way as English "of". Though written as a prefix on the noun in the genitive, the modern spoken form occurs as a suffix on the head, with some dialects displaying final-obstruent devoicing.

Verbs

Finite verbs carry person, gender and number, as well as tense and conjugation. The non-finite verb forms are the gerund and the active and passive participles. Verb forms are marked for person, number, gender, mood and voice.
Assyrian employs a system of conjugations to mark intensive and extensive developments in the lexical meaning of verbs. Verb conjugations are present in other Semitic languages. These are regular modifications of the verb's root to express other changes in meaning. The first conjugation is the 'ground' stem, which models the shape of the root and carries the usual meaning of the word. The next is the 'intensive' stem, which usually carries an intensified meaning. The third is the 'extensive' stem, which is often causative in meaning. Although Classical Syriac has a coordinate passive conjugation for each stem, Modern Assyrian does not. Instead, passive meanings are sometimes expressed through the Peal; agentive ones, through the Aphel. The following table illustrates the possible verbal conjugations of the root ṣ-l-y, which carries the basic meaning of "descending":
The particle wā may follow verbal forms to indicate an action further in the past.
Assyrian may also negate clauses by using double negatives, such as in the phrase le yawin la zuze. Common negation words include la, hič and čuh, depending on usage and dialect.
;Verbal stems
AspectStem
Imperativeptux
Indicativepatx-
Perfectptix-
Gerundptaxa

Suffixes

Assyrian uses verbal inflections marking person and number. The suffix "-e" indicates a plural. Enclitic forms of personal pronouns are affixed to various parts of speech. As with the object pronoun, possessive pronouns are suffixes that are attached to the end of nouns to express possession similar to the English pronouns my, your, his, her, etc., which reflects the gender and plurality of the person or persons. This is a synthetic feature found in other Semitic languages and also in unrelated languages such as Finnish, Persian and Turkish. Moreover, unlike many other languages, Assyrian has virtually no means of deriving words by adding prefixes or suffixes to words. Instead, they are formed according to a limited number of templates applied to roots. Modern Assyrian, like Hebrew and Akkadian but unlike Arabic, has only "sound" plurals formed by means of a plural ending. As in all Semitic languages, some masculine nouns take the prototypically feminine plural ending.

Possessive suffixes

Although possessive suffixes are more convenient and common, they can be optional for some people and seldom used, especially among those with the Tyari and Barwari dialects, which take a more analytic approach regarding possession, just like English possessive determiners. The following are periphrastic ways to express possession, using the word betā as a base :
Like English, Assyrian is stress-timed language, although some dialects may be more syllable-timed. In native words, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic almost always stresses the penultimate syllable. Although Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, like all Semitic languages, is not a tonal language, a tonal stress is made on a plural possessive suffix -éh in the final vowel to tonally differentiate it from an unstressed -eh, 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 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", whilst retaining the stress in -éh for "their".
This phenomenon however may not always be present, as some Hakkari speakers, especially those from Tyari and Barwar, would use analytic speech to denote possession. So, for instance, bābeh would be uttered as bābā-id dīyeh. In Iraqi Koine and Urmian, the plural form and the third person plural possessive suffix of many words, such as wardeh and biyyeh, would be homophones were it not for the varying, distinctive stress on the penult or ultima.

Determinative

When it comes to a determinative, Modern Assyrian generally has an absence of an article, unlike other Semitic languages such as Arabic, which does use a definite article. Demonstratives are commonly utilised instead, which can have the sense of "the". An indefinite article can mark definiteness if the word is a direct object by using the prepositional prefix "l-" paired with the proper suffix. Partitive articles may be used in some speech.
Furthermore, Ancient Aramaic had a definite article in the form of a suffix: "-ā" for generally masculine words and "-tā" for feminine. The definite forms were pallāxā for "the worker" and pallāxtā for "the worker". Beginning even in the Classical Syriac era, the 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 worker" and pālaxtā became "a/the worker."

Consonantal root

Most Assyrian Neo-Aramaic nouns and verbs are built from triconsonantal roots, which are a form of word formation in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially. Unlike Arabic, broken plurals are not present. Semitic languages typically utilise triconsonantal roots, forming a "grid" into which vowels may be inserted without affecting the basic root.
The root š-q-l has the basic meaning of "taking", and the following are some words that can be formed from this root:
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic has lost the perfect and imperfect morphological tenses common in other Semitic languages. The present tense is usually marked with the subject pronoun followed by the participle; however, such pronouns are usually omitted in the case of the third person. This use of the participle to mark the present tense is the most common of a number of compound tenses that can be used to express varying senses of tense and aspect. Assyrian's new system of inflection is claimed to resemble the one of the Indo-European languages, namely the Iranian languages. This assertion is founded on
the utilisation of an active participle concerted with a copula and a passive participle with a genitive/dative element which is present in Old Persian and in Neo-Aramaic.
Both Modern Persian and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic build the present perfect tense around the past/resultative participle in conjunct with the copula. The more conservative Assyrian
dialects lay the copula in its full shape before the verbal constituent. In the Iraqi and Iranian dialects, the previous construction is addressable with different types of the copula but with the elemental copula only the cliticised form is permitted. Among conservative Urmian speakers, only the construction with the enclitic ordered after the verbal constituent is allowed. Due to language contact, the similarities between Kurdish and Modern Persian and the Urmian dialects become even more evident with their negated forms of present perfect, where they display close similarities, which, from the Assyrian perspective, are patent innovations in the Assyrian language.
A recent feature of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is the usage of the infinitive instead of the present base for the expression of the present progressive, which is also united with the copula. Although the language has some other varieties of the copula precedent to the verbal constituent, the common construction is with the infinitive and the basic copula cliticsed to it. In Jewish Urmian of Assyrian, the symmetrical order of the constituents is with the present perfect tense. This structure of the Assyrian dialects is to be compared with the present progressive in Kurdish and Turkish as well, where the enclitic follows the infinitive. 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 Assyrian. The similarities of the constituents and their alignment in the present progressive construction in Assyrian is clearly attributed to influence from the neighbouring languages, such as the use of the infinitive for this construction and the employment of the enclitic copula after the verbal base in all verbal constructions, which is due to the impinging of the Kurdish and Turkish speech.
The morphology and the valency of the verb, and the arrangement of the grammatical roles should be noticed when it comes to the similarities with Kurdish. Unlike Old Persian, Modern Persian made no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, where it unspecialised the absolutive type of inflection. Different handling of inflection with transitive and intransitive verbs is also nonexistent in the Assyrian dialects. In contrast with Persian though, it was the ergative type that was generalised in Assyrian.
;Persian and Assyrian verb tense comparison
LanguageTransitive verbIntransitive verbGloss
Modern Persiankošte-am
kill.PPTCP-COP.1SG		āmade-am
arrive.PPTCP-COP.1SG		'I killed', 'I arrived'
Assyrian Neo-Aramaicqṭǝl-li
kill.PPTCP-1SG.OBL		dmǝx-li
sleep.PPTCP-1SG.OBL		'I killed', 'I went to sleep'

Ergativity

Although Aramaic has been a nominative-accusative language historically, split ergativity in Christian and Jewish Neo-Aramaic languages developed through interaction with ergative Iranian languages, such as Kurdish, which is spoken by the Muslim population of the region. Ergativity formed in the perfective aspect only, whereas the subject, the original agent construction of the passive participle, was expressed as an oblique with dative case, and is presented by verb-agreement rather than case. The absolutive argument in transitive clauses is the syntactic object. The dialects of Kurdish make a concordant distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs by using a tense-split ergative pattern, which is present in the tense system of some Assyrian dialects; The nominative accusative type is made use of in the present for all the verbs and also for intransitive verbs in past tense and the ergative type is used instead for transitive verbs.
Unique among the Semitic languages, the development of ergativity in northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects involved the departure of original Aramaic tensed finite verbal forms. Thereafter, the active participle became the root of the modern Assyrian imperfective, while the passive participle evolved into the modern Assyrian perfective. The Extended-Ergative dialects, which include Iraqi Koine, Hakkari and Christian Urmian dialects, show the lowest state of ergativity and would mark unaccusative subjects and intransitive verbs in an ergative pattern. Furthermore, Assyrian dialects exhibiting a higher level of ergativity are mostly SOV, while the dialects displaying a lower degree of ergativity are generally SVO.
;Ergativity patterns
Perfective stemSplit-S
Dynamic-Stative
Extended-Erg
he opened itpləx-∅-le
open-ABS-ERG		pləx-∅-le
open-ABS-ERG		ptíx-∅-le
open-MASC-ERG
it openedplix-∅
open-ABS		pləx-le
open-ERG		ptíx-le
open-ERG
it got cutqəṭe-∅
cut-ABS		qṭe-le
cut-ERG		qṭí-le
cut-ERG
it was ruinedxrəw-∅-le
ruin-ABS-ERG		məxrəw-le-le
ruin-ERG-ACC		xríw-∅-le
ruin-ABS-ERG

Vocabulary

One online Assyrian dictionary website, , lists a total 40,642 words–half of which are root words. Due to geographical proximity, Assyrian has an extensive number of Iranian loanwords–namely Persian and Kurdish–incorporated in its vocabulary, as well as some Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and, increasingly within the last century, English loanwords. Mesopotamian Iraqi Arabic, being an Aramaic Syriac substratum, is said to be the most Syriac-influenced dialect of Arabic, sharing significant similarities in language structure, as well as having evident and stark influences from other ancient Mesopotamian languages of Iraq, such as Akkadian, Babylonian and Sumerian. Mesopotamian Arabic dialects developed by Iraqi Muslims, Iraqi Jews, as well as dialects by Iraqi Christians, most of whom are native Syriac speakers.
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic has over 300 words borrowed into its vocabulary directly from Akkadian, some of them also being borrowed into neighbouring Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. 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. A few deviations in pronunciation between the Akkadian and the Assyrian Aramaic words are probably due to mistranslations of cuneiform signs which can have several readings. While Akkadian nouns generally end in "-u" in the nominative case, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic words nouns end with the vowel "-a" in their lemma form.

Dialects

SIL Ethnologue distinguishes five dialect groups: Urmian, Northern, Central, Western and Sapna, each with sub-dialects. Mutual intelligibility between the Assyrian dialects is as high as 80%–90%.
The Urmia dialect has become the prestige dialect of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic after 1836, when that dialect was chosen by Justin Perkins, an American Presbyterian missionary, for the creation of a standard literary dialect of Assyrian. A second standard dialect derived from General Urmian known as "Iraqi Koine", developed in the 20th century.
In 1852, Perkins's translation of the Bible into General Urmian was published by the American Bible Society with a parallel text of the Classical Syriac Peshitta.

Grouping

Iraqi Koine, also known as Iraqi Assyrian and "Standard" Assyrian, is a compromise between the rural Ashiret accents of Hakkari and Nineveh Plains and the former prestigious dialect in Urmia. Iraqi Koine does not really constitute a new dialect, but an incomplete merger of dialects, with some speakers sounding more Urmian, such as those from Habbaniya, and others more Hakkarian, such as those who immigrated from Northern Iraq. 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 Farsi influence in some consonants and vowels, as the front vowels in Urmian tend to be more fronted and the back ones more rounded. For an English accent equivalence, the difference between Iraqi Koine and Urmian dialect would be akin to the difference between Australian and New Zealand English.
During the First World War, many Assyrians living in Ottoman Turkey were forced from their homes, and many of their descendants now live in Iraq. The relocation has led to the creation of this dialect. Iraqi Koine was developed in the urban areas of Iraq, which became the meccas for the rural Assyrian population. By the end of the 1950s, vast number of Assyrians started to speak Iraqi Koine. Today, Iraqi Koine is the predominant use of communication between the majority of the Assyrians from Iraqi cities and it is also used as the standard dialect in music and formal speech.
Some modern Hakkari speakers from Iraq can switch back and forth from their Hakkari dialects to Iraqi Koine when conversing with Assyrian speakers of other dialects. Some Syrian-Assyrians, who originate from Hakkari, may also speak or sing in Iraqi Koine. 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. Elements of original Ashiret dialects can still be observed in Iraqi Koine, especially in that of older speakers. Furthermore, Assyrian songs are generally sung in Iraqi Koine in order for them to be intelligible and have widespread recognition. To note, the emergence of Koine did not signify that the rest of the spoken dialects vanished. The Ashiret dialects are still active today and widely spoken in Northern Iraq and Northeastern Syria as some Assyrians remained in the rural areas and the fact that the first generation speakers who relocated in urban areas still maintained their native dialects.

Dialect continuum

Neo-Aramaic has a rather slightly defined dialect continuum, starting from the Assyrians in northern Iraq and ending with those in Western Iran. The dialects in Northern Iraq, such as those of Alqosh and Batnaya, would be minimally unintelligible to those in Western Iran.
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. Furthermore, the Barwar and Tyari dialects are "transitional", acquiring both Assyrian and Chaldean phonetic features. 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.
In Hakkari, going east, the Nochiya dialect would begin to sound distinct to the Tyari/Barwar dialects and more like the Urmian dialect in Urmia, Western Azerbaijan, containing a few Urmian features. The Urmian dialect, alongside Iraqi Koine, are considered to be "Standard Assyrian", though Iraqi Koine is more widespread and has thus become the more common standard dialect in recent times. Both Koine and Urmian share phonetic characteristics with the Nochiya dialect to some degree.

Literature

Early Syriac texts still date to the 2nd century, notably the Syriac Bible and the Diatesseron Gospel harmony. The bulk of Syriac literary production dates to between the 4th and 8th centuries.
Classical Syriac literacy survives into the 9th century, though Syriac Christian authors in this period increasingly wrote in Arabic. 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.
Because Assyrian, alongside Turoyo, is the most widely spoken variety of Syriac today, modern Syriac literature would therefore usually be written in those varieties. The conversion of the Mongols to Islam began a period of retreat and hardship for Syriac Christianity and its adherents, although there still has been a continuous stream of Syriac literature in Upper Mesopotamia and the Levant from the 14th century through to the present day. This has included the flourishing of literature from the various colloquial Eastern Aramaic Neo-Aramaic languages still spoken by Assyrians.
This Neo-Syriac literature bears a dual tradition: it continues the traditions of the Syriac literature of the past and it incorporates a converging stream of the less homogeneous spoken language. The first such flourishing of Neo-Syriac was the seventeenth century literature of the School of Alqosh, in northern Iraq. This literature led to the establishment of Assyrian Aramaic as written literary languages.
In the nineteenth century, printing presses were established in Urmia, in northern Iran. This led to the establishment of the 'General Urmian' dialect of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic as the standard in much Neo-Syriac Assyrian literature up until the 20th century. 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.