Bohtan New Aramaic Language

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Bohtan Neo-Aramaic ܣܘܪܬ Sôreth

Spoken in

Georgia , previously Russia (mainly in Gardabani village)
speaker 1,000 (as of 1999)
Linguistic
classification

Afro-Asian

  • Semitic
    • Central Semitic
      • Aramaic
        • Eastern Aramaic
          • New Northeast Aramaic Languages
    Bohtan New Aramaic Language
Language codes
ISO 639-3

bhn

Bohtan New Aramaic is a modern Eastern New Aramaic language. It was originally spoken in the Bohtan plain in the Şırnak province in south-east Turkey , but today it is mainly spoken in south-east Georgia around the village of Gardabani near Rustavi .

Before the First World War , there were around 30,000 speakers of Bohtan New Aramaic in the Ottoman Empire on the Bohtan plain around the city of Cizre . They were mostly Assyrian Christians , their language a northern dialect of Chaldean-New Aramaic . With the genocide of the Syrian Christians in eastern Turkey, many speakers were killed or displaced; the survivors settled in Garbadani, 530 km away. Their descendants currently use Georgian or Russian rather than the traditional language.

In 1999, a study by Samuel Ethan Fox found that Bohtan New Aramaic retained many of the conservative properties of Chaldean and Assyrian New Aramaic , which disappeared in the standard dialects of the cities of Alqosh and Urmia , but also showed foreign innovations in other dialects.

literature

  • Samuel Eithan Fox: A Neo-Aramaic dialect of Bohtan. In: W. Arnold, H. Bobzin (Ed.): “Talk to your servants in Aramaic, we understand!” 60 contributions to the Semitic Festschrift for Otto Jastrow on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2002, pp. 165-180.
  • Wolfhart Heinrichs (Ed.): Studies in Neo-Aramaic. Scholars Pressm Atlanta, Georgia 1990, ISBN 1-55540-430-8 .
  • Arthur John Maclean: Grammar of the dialects of vernacular Syriac: as spoken by the Eastern Syrians of Kurdistan, north-west Persia, and the Plain of Mosul: with notices of the vernacular of the Jews of Azerbaijan and of Zakhu near Mosul. Cambridge University Press, London 1895.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bohtan Neo-Aramaic reference to Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)