12.7 Why the dialect you are learning is a blend

12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

After the war people could go back, and here is the sentence that matters most for this guide: the majority settled in the town of Urmi, and only a small proportion returned to the villages.

Two hundred village varieties ended up in one urban community. They mixed, and the differences between them were largely levelled and blurred. Khan can still partly reconstruct them, because he did fieldwork among the oldest speakers — the ones who grew up in a village and still carry its features and its farming vocabulary. But the dialect in his grammar, and in this guide, is the blend.

He sorts what survives into four broad varieties: the villages south of Urmi, the villages north of it, Armenia and Georgia. The differences are real — the southern villages turn some k and g sounds into ch and j, the Caucasus contracts word endings the plain keeps in full, the Georgian village of Canda has words nobody else uses — and none of them stops anyone understanding anyone.

One group is deliberately not in Khan's description: the Assyrians resettled after the war in Iraq, mainly Baghdad and Kirkuk. Living among speakers of other dialects, they came to speak a koine that drifted from the Urmi of Iran and the Caucasus. If your family came through Iraq, that is worth knowing — and Chapter 11 is the bridge.

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