Lishan Didan: Encyclopedia II - Lishan Didan - Origin and use today

Lishan Didan - Origin and use today

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). Lishán Didán, at the northeastern extreme of this area, is somewhat intelligible with the Jewish Neo-Aramaic languages of Hulaula (spoken further south, in Iranian Kurdistan) and Lishanid Noshan (formerly spoken around Kirkuk, Iraq). However, the local Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic are unintelligible: Christian and Jewish communities living side by side developed completely different variants of Aramaic that had more in common with their co-religionists living further away than with their neighbours. Lishán Didán is sometimes called Targumic, due to the long tradition of translating the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, and the production of targums.

There are two major dialect clusters of Lishán Didán. The northern cluster of dialects centred around Urmia and Salmas in West Azarbaijan, and extended into the Jewish villages of the Turkish province of Van. 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: Persian, Kurdish and Turkish languages especially.

The upheavals in their traditional region after the First World War and the founding of the State of Israel led most of the Azerbaijani Jews to settle in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. However, uprooted from their homes, and thrown together with so many different language groups in the fledgling nation, Lishán Didán began to be replaced in the speech of younger generations by Modern Hebrew. Fewer than 5,000 people are known to speak Lishán Didan, and most of them are over 50 years old. The language faces extinction in the next few decades.

Lishán Didán is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Spelling tends to be highly phonetic, and elided letters are not written.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Origin and use today", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki