Geoffrey Khan

Jewish Neo-aramaic Dialect of Sulemaniyya and Halabja (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics) Geoffrey Khan

This volume contains a detailed grammatical description of the spoken Aramaic dialect of the Jewish communities in the towns of Sulemaniyya and ?alabja in North Eastern Iraq. It also includes a transcription of oral texts recorded in the dialect.

The grammar is based on extensive fieldwork carried out among native speakers. It consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax. There is also a study of semantic fields in the lexicon of the dialect and full glossaries of lexical items.

This Aramaic dialect, which belongs to the North Eastern Neo-Aramaic group, has never been described before. The Jewish communities left Sulemaniyya and ?alabja in the 1950s and the dialect is now on the verge of extinction.