Aramaic has been spoken uninterruptedly for more than 3000 years, yet a generation from now most Aramaic dialects will be extinct. The study of the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects has increased dramatically in the past decade as linguists seek to record these dialects before the disappearance of their last speakers. This work is a unique documentation of the now extinct Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Challa (modern-day Çukurca, Turkey). It is based on recordings of the last native speaker of the dialect, who passed away in 2007. In addition to a grammatical description, it contains sample texts and a glossary of the dialect. Jewish Challa belongs to the cluster of NENA dialects known as 'lishana deni' and reference is made throughout to other dialects within this group.

This book combines in-depth grammatical analysis with dialectology and typology. It presents important features of Jewish Neo-Aramaic from Dohok (Iraqi Kurdistan), a previously undocumented dialect that is now on the verge of extinction. The first Neo-Aramaic grammar to offer data glossing, this book is accessible for and highly relevant to Semitists, language typologists and historical linguists. It focuses especially on phonology, verbal morphosyntax and syntax. The monograph also highlights features that characterise the wider lišana deni dialect group, which is the most widespread Jewish Neo-Aramaic today. The book leverages the staggering microvariation persisting within North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic to reconstruct the grammaticalisation of some key Neo-Aramaic constructions. It also includes a text sample of prime historiographic value (Jews of Iraq during the Second World War).

This book offers sociological and structural descriptions of language varieties used in over 2 dozen Jewish communities around the world, along with synthesizing and theoretical chapters. Language descriptions focus on historical development, contemporary use, regional and social variation, structural features, and Hebrew/Aramaic loanwords. The book covers commonly researched language varieties, like Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as less commonly researched ones, like Judeo-Tat, Jewish Swedish, and Hebraized Amharic in Israel today.

The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

The detailed study of a rare Neo-Aramaic variety from north-eastern Iraq offered by Lidia Napiorkowska in A Grammar of the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw is a contribution to the documentation of the endangered world of spoken Aramaic. The comparative and contact-sensitive approach of the monograph situates the dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw in a wider context of Semitic languages on the one hand, and of the local varieties of Iraqi Kurdistan on the other. Next to a systematic account of phonology and morphology, the book covers a range of syntactic features and is accompanied by a corpus of translated texts and a glossary, arranged according to the Aramaic, as well as English entries.

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Betanure, which has hitherto remained unattested, is among the rarest and most seriously endangered varieties of Aramaic spoken at the present time. One of the most archaizing Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties and a member of the Lishana Deni dialect cluster of northernmost Iraq, the dialect is currently spoken in Israel by no more than three dozen elderly people, of whom only a small minority are pro'cient speakers. The grammatical description of the dialect is synchronic, but it includes etymological and historical comments as well as several paragraphs dealing with diachronic processes. The large and variegated corpus of texts, based on narratives furnished by the last two superb speakers of the dialect, comprises, inter alia, descriptions of the village of Betanure and its history, the fauna and ?ora of the region, agriculture and other occupations of the Jewish villagers, customs and traditions, legends, folktales, anecdotes and amusing stories. The glossary is extensively etymological and offers much comparative data drawn from numerous Neo-Aramaic varieties, apart from recourse to Classical Aramaic lexical data.

The handbook The Semitic Languages offers a comprehensive reference tool for Semitic Linguistics in its broad sense. It is not restricted to comparative Grammar, although it covers also comparative aspects, including classification. By comprising a chapter on typology and sections with sociolinguistic focus and language contact, the conception of the book aims at a rather complete, unbiased description of the state of the art in Semitics. Articles on individual languages and dialects give basic facts as location, numbers of speakers, scripts, numbers of extant texts and their nature, attestation where appropriate, and salient features of the grammar and lexicon of the respective variety. The handbook is the most comprehensive treatment of the Semitic language family since many decades.