The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia, a dialect of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, was originally spoken by Jews in Urmia and surrounding areas of Iranian Azerbaijan from Salmas to Solduz and into what is now Yüksekova, Hakkâri and Başkale, Van Province in eastern Turkey. Most speakers now live in Israel.

The Names of the Language

Lishan Didan is often referred to by scholars as Jewish (Persian) Azerbaijani Neo-Aramaic.

Lishan Didan (pronunciation: [liːˈʃan diːˈdan]) literally translates to "our language" (morphological gloss: tongue-∅ GEN.1<small>PL</small>.<small>EX</small>). The name of the language exhibits clusivity marking: a more exact translation of "Lishan Didan" would be "our language, but not yours." When one speaker of the language is speaking to another, they may refer to the language using inclusive marking "Lishanan" (pronunciation: [liˈʃaːnan]), which can be translated as "our language, including yours" (morphological gloss: tongue-∅-1<small>PL</small>.<small>IN</small>). This distinction may be unique among the Neo-Aramaic Languages. The southern cluster of dialects was focused on the town of Mahabad and villages just south of Lake Urmia. The dialects of the two clusters are intelligible to one another, and most of the differences are due to receiving loanwords from different languages: Standard Persian, Kurdish and Turkish languages especially.

The Nash Didan community

The history of Jews in this region goes back millennia. According to Nash Didan tradition, the Jewish community of Urmia dates back to the Babylonian Exile, when they were forcibly relocated from The Kingdom of Judah to Mesopotamia. Archeological evidence (including bronze, silver, and gold artifacts with Jewish iconography) points to Jewish settlement in the Urmia region as early as the 8th century BCE. This tradition further dictates that Nash Didan Jews did not return to Israel after the declaration issued by the emperor Cyrus II of Persia, after he conquered the region and ushered in the Second Temple period. Rather, they remained in the region under the Achaemenid Empire.

Many of the Jews of Urmia worked as peddlers in the cloth trade, while others were jewelers or goldsmiths. The degree of education for the boys was primary school, with only some advancing their Jewish schooling in a Talmud yeshiva. Some of these students earned their livelihood by making talismans and amulets. There was also a small girls yeshiva with only twenty pupils. The last head of the girls yeshiva was known as Rəbbi Hawa.

thumb|Kalimiyan Synagogue, Urmia, 2010

This region has long suffered instability. The Ottoman and Persian Empires often used tensions between Assyrians, Azeris, Kurds, and Armenians to fight proxy wars in the region. By 1918, due to the assassination of Shimun XIX Benyamin, Patriarch of the Church of the East as part of the Assyrian Genocide, and the invasion of the Ottoman forces, many Jews were uprooted from their homes and fled. Some Jews temporarily relocated to Tbilisi. The upheavals in their traditional region after World War I and the founding of the State of Israel led most Nash Didan to settle near Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and small villages in various parts of the country. The language faces extinction in the next few decades, largely due to the lack of a centralized community. While most native speakers are in Israel, the use of Lishan Didan in the United States is comparatively strong since many of them left Iran at least 30 years later.

The use of the internet, such as Facebook groups, has helped to keep the language in use. Institutions such as Wikitongues, the Jewish Language Project, the Endangered Language Alliance, and the Lishana Institute in Israel are working to document the language before it goes extinct. The Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages offers a class on a different dialect, but will maybe one day include Lishan Didan. However, despite these efforts, the language is rapidly dying, and more still needs to be done to keep the language from extinction.

Lishan Didan is often confused with a similar language Inter-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic which is sometimes referred to as "Lishana Didan."

Another language is called Manuscript Barzani or Barzani Jewish Neo-Aramaic. Manuscript Barzani was spoken in a community in Iraqi Kurdistan of the Rewanduz/Arbel region. This language is also called targum, as it follows distinct translation techniques used by Targum Onkelos and Targum Jonathan. Many members of the Barzani family were rabbis and Torah scholars. The rabbis would travel around Kurdistan to set up and maintain yeshivas in the towns of Barzan, Aqra, Mosul, and Amediya. Much literature (commentaries on religious text, poetry, prayers, ritual instructions) has been compiled and published by the members of the Barzani family and their community. One of the most famous members of the Barzani family is Tanna'it Asenath Barzani, perhaps the first female rabbinical figure in modern Jewish history.

Intelligibility

Lishan DIdan, at the northeastern extreme of the area in which Neo-Aramaic is spoken, is somewhat intelligible with Trans-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic (spoken further south, in Iranian Kurdistan) and Inter-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic (formerly spoken around Kirkuk, Iraq).

However, the local Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects of Suret Neo-Aramaic are only mildly mutually intelligible: Christian and Jewish communities living side by side developed completely different variants of Aramaic that had more in common with their coreligionists living further away than with their neighbors. Over ten thousand people died en route to Urmia.

{| class="wikitable"

!Jewish Urmia

!Assyrian Urmia

!

|-

|belà

|béta

|'house'

|-

|zorá

|súra

|'small'

|-

|-u

|-e

|'their'

|-

|-ilet

|-iwət

|2ms copula

|-

|mqy

|hmzm

|'to speak'

|-

|kwś

|ˤsly

|'to descend'

|}

Phonology

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

|+Consonants

{| class="wikitable"

! Ancient Aramaic

! A. A. pronunciation

! Zāxō

! Dehōk

! ʿAmadiya

! Urmia

! Irbil

|-

|ידאֿ "hand"

|ʾ īḏa

|ʾ īza

|ʾ īḏa

|ʾ īda

|īda

|īla

|-

|ביתאֿ "house"

|bēṯa

|bēsa

|bēṯa

|bēṯa

|bēla

|bēla

|}

Reflexes

As a trans-Zab dialect, Jewish Salamas *ḏ has a reflex l like the Irbil dialect above. Examples are: