The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Amadya

This work is a linguistic description of an obsolescent dialect of Neo-Aramaic. The dialect was originally spoken by Jews residing in the village of AmÃ'¢dya (a.k.a Amadiya) in modern-day northern Iraq. No native speakers of this dialect remain in situ. They, along with the other Jewish communities of the Kurdish region, had all left by 1951. The majority went to Israel, where their numbers have dwindled. The dialect has not been passed on to the next generation, whose native tongue is Modern Israeli Hebrew, and there remain but a handful of competent native speakers, whose speech has often been corrupted to varying degrees by exposure to Hebrew and other closely-related Neo-Aramaic dialects.