Assyrian language may refer to:
Aramaic is a Semitic language that originated among the Arameans in the ancient region of Syria. For over three thousand years, Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires and also as a language of divine worship and religious study. Several dialects are still spoken today. It subsequently branched into several Neo-Aramaic languages that are more widely spoken in modern times.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Akkadian is an East Semitic language, now extinct, that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC.
The Syriac language, also known as Syriac Aramaic and Classical Syriac ܠܫܢܐ ܥܬܝܩܐ, is an Aramaic dialect that emerged during the first century AD from a local Aramaic dialect that was spoken in the ancient region of Osroene, centered in the city of Edessa. During the Early Christian period, it became the main literary language of various Aramaic-speaking Christian communities in the historical region of Ancient Syria and throughout the Near East. As a liturgical language of Syriac Christianity, it gained a prominent role among Eastern Christian communities that used both Eastern Syriac and Western Syriac rites. Following the spread of Syriac Christianity, it also became a liturgical language of eastern Christian communities as far as India and China. It flourished from the 4th to the 8th century, and continued to have an important role during the next centuries, but by the end of the Middle Ages it was gradually reduced to liturgical use, since the role of vernacular language among its native speakers was overtaken by several emerging Neo-Aramaic dialects.
Chaldean may refer to:
The Arameans were an ancient Semitic-speaking people in the Near East, first recorded in historical sources from the late 12th century BCE. The Aramean homeland was known as the land of Aram, encompassing central regions of modern Syria. At the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, a number of Aramean states were established throughout the western regions of the ancient Near East. The most notable among them was the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus, that reached its height in the second half of the 9th century BCE, during the reign of king Hazael. A distinctive Aramaic alphabet was also developed and used for writing in the Old Aramaic language.
Syriac may refer to:
Aram, also known as Aramea, was a historical region including several Aramean kingdoms covering much of the present-day Syria, southeastern Turkey, and parts of Lebanon and Iraq. At its height, Aram stretched from the Mount Lebanon range eastward across the Euphrates, including parts of the Khabur River valley in northwestern Mesopotamia on the border of modern Iraq. The rise of the Aramean states throughout the Middle East even caused a language shift. The Aramaic language eventually replaced Akkadian as the lingua franca of the entire region and became the administrative and commercial language of several empires such as the Achaemenid Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
Mlaḥsô or Mlahsö, sometimes referred to as Suryoyo or Surayt, is an extinct or dormant Central Neo-Aramaic language. It was traditionally spoken in eastern Turkey and later also in northeastern Syria by Syriac Orthodox Christians.
Suret ܣܘܪܝܬ, also known as Assyrian, Syriac, or Chaldean, refers to the varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) spoken by ethnic Assyrians, including those identifying as religious groups rather than ethnic as a result of the Assyrian identity being banned in Iraq until 2004 and its continued unrecognized status in Syria, Turkey, and Israel-Palestine. 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. 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, but Suret is not a direct descendant of Classical Syriac.
Judaeo-Aramaic languages represent a group of Hebrew-influenced Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic languages.
The Neo-Aramaic or Modern Aramaic languages are varieties of Aramaic that evolved during the late medieval and early modern periods, and continue to the present day as vernacular (spoken) languages of modern Aramaic-speaking communities. Within the field of Aramaic studies, classification of Neo-Aramaic languages has been a subject of particular interest among scholars, who proposed several divisions, into two, three or four primary groups.
Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) is a grouping of related dialects of Neo-Aramaic spoken before World War I as a vernacular language by Jews and Christians between the Tigris and Lake Urmia, stretching north to Lake Van and southwards to Mosul and Kirkuk. As a result of the Sayfo Christian speakers were forced out of the area that is now Turkey and in the early 1950s most Jewish speakers moved to Israel. The Kurdish-Turkish conflict resulted in further dislocations of speaker populations. As of the 1990s, the NENA group had an estimated number of fluent speakers among the Assyrians just below 500,000, spread throughout the Middle East and the Assyrian diaspora. In 2007, linguist Geoffrey Khan wrote that many dialects were nearing extinction with fluent speakers difficult to find.
Assyria may refer to:
The Western Aramaic languages represent a specific group of Aramaic languages once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, from ancient Nabatea and Judea, across Palestine and Samaria, further to Palmyra and Phoenicia, and into Syria proper. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by the Arameans and ancient People of the Levant, such as the people of Palestine before Islam. All of the Western Aramaic languages are today considered extinct, except Western Neo-Aramaic.
The Eastern Aramaic languages have developed from the varieties of Aramaic that developed in and around Mesopotamia, as opposed to western varieties of the Levant. Most speakers are ethnic Assyrians, although there are a minority of Kurdish Jews and Mandaeans, who also speak varieties of Eastern Aramaic.
The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient Iran, Anatolia/Asia Minor and the Armenian Highlands, the Levant, Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near East is studied in the fields of Ancient Near East studies, Near Eastern archaeology and ancient history.
Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA is a British linguist who has held the post of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge since 2012. He has published grammars for the Aramaic dialects of Barwari, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Halabja in Iraq; of Urmia and Sanandaj in Iran; and leads the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Database.
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were Western Asian people who lived throughout the ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity.
Aramaic studies are scientific studies of the Aramaic language and cultural history of Arameans. As a specific field within Semitic studies, Aramaic studies are closely related to similar disciplines, like Hebraic studies and Arabic studies.