12.11 The neighbours in the language
12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar
Urmi Assyrian has lived next to a lot of other languages, and it shows. Azeri Turkish left the deepest mark and is the majority spoken language of the region's Muslim population today; Assyrians sometimes call it lishanet hoshare, "the language of the Afshars," after the Afshar Turks whom Nader Shah settled there in the eighteenth century. Persian, the language of administration, left many loanwords, as did Russian — lightly on the plain, heavily in the Caucasus. Kurdish is still spoken around Urmi and left an older layer, and Arabic an older one still, from northern Mesopotamia. Armenian was spoken on the plain, sometimes in the same villages, and many Assyrians spoke it — but it left almost no trace in the words.
The borrowing goes deeper than vocabulary — putting an adjective before its noun, or the object before the verb, is Azeri word order showing through — but Khan is careful each time to say the convergence is real and incomplete. Assyrian bent towards its neighbours without becoming them.
One last thing, because it surprises people. There were Jews in Urmi speaking their own Neo-Aramaic dialect until they left in the 1950s, and it really was a different dialect — bela against beta for "house," zora against sura for "small," a different way of building nearly every verb form. Christians and Jews in the town could understand each other without much trouble, but the two were not close, and the reason is §12.3: the Jewish community had deep roots in the town, while the Christians had only recently come in from the countryside. Two communities in one place is not the same as two communities with a shared past.
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