Suret language
Suret, also known as Assyrian, is any of several varieties of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic spoken by Christians, namely Assyrians. 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.
Suret speakers are indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia, northwestern Iran, southeastern Anatolia and the northeastern Levant, which is a large region stretching from the plain of Urmia in northwestern Iran through to the Nineveh Plains, Erbil, Kirkuk and Duhok regions in northern Iraq, together with the northeastern regions of Syria and to south-central and southeastern Turkey. Instability throughout the Middle East over the past century has led to a worldwide diaspora of Suret speakers, with most speakers now living abroad in such places as North and South America, Australia, Europe and Russia. Speakers of Suret and Turoyo are ethnic Assyrians and are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia.
SIL distinguishes between Chaldean and Assyrian as varieties of Suret on non-linguistic grounds. Suret is mutually intelligible with some NENA dialects spoken by Jews, especially in the western part of its historical extent. Its mutual intelligibility with Turoyo is partial and asymmetrical, but more significant in written form.
Suret 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. Suret is written from right-to-left and it uses the Madnḥāyā version of the Syriac alphabet. Suret, 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. However, emigration has also had another effect: the language has gained more global attention, with several initiatives to digitize and preserve it, and the number of people learning Suret is considerably higher than before.
History
and Aramaic have been in extensive contact since their old periods. Local unwritten Aramaic dialects emerged from Imperial Aramaic in Assyria. In around 700 BCE, 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 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 BCE, Imperial Aramaic gradually lost its status as an imperial language, but continued to flourish alongside Ancient Greek.
File:Syriac Sertâ book script.jpg|thumb|250px|An 11th-century Classical Syriac manuscript, written in Serto script
By the 1st century AD, Akkadian was extinct, though vocabulary and grammatical features still survive in modern NENA dialects. The Neo-Aramaic languages evolved from Middle Syriac-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.
File:Assyrian Gospel 1.jpg|thumb|An 18th-century gospel Book from the Urmia 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, the inhabitants of the region began to embrace Christianity. Because of theological differences, Syriac-speaking Christians bifurcated during the fifth century into the Church of the East, or East Syriac Rite, under the Sasanian Empire, and the Syriac Orthodox, or West Syriac Rite, under the Byzantine Empire. After this separation, the two groups developed distinct dialects differing primarily in the pronunciation and written symbolisation of vowels.
File:Syriac Christianity.svg|thumb|right|295px|alt=The distribution of the Syriac language in the Middle East and Asia|Post 2010, in Iraq, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic is mainly spoken in the Nineveh Plains and the cities around Mosul, Duhok, Erbil and Kirkuk.
The Mongol invasions of the Levant in the 13th century and the religiously motivated massacres of Assyrians by Timur 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 spoken by Christians, including Suret. 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 recognized 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 Constitution of Iraq 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 Hadrian's Wall in Prehistoric Britain, in the form of inscriptions in Aramaic, made by Assyrian soldiers serving in the Roman Legions in northern England during the 2ndcentury AD.