Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Near East

Project Information

ALHOME

Grant agreement ID: 101021183

DOI

10.3030/101021183

Project closed

EC signature date 20 July 2021

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 997 800,00

EU contribution

€ 1 997 800,00

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ALHOME (Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Near East)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ERC ALHOME Project (2021-2025) is carried out by the ALHOME research unit at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge under the direction of Professor Geoffrey Khan. It aims to reconstruct the history of disappearing indigenous communities in the Middle East through the study of their linguistic past. These communities were once more widespread in the Middle East from the first millennium BC into Islamic times. Modern-day Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran are the home of remarkably diverse groups of people with their own religious traditions and languages. Ever since the First World War (1914-1918) the continuity of non-Muslim presence in this region has been seriously under threat. These gradually disappearing linguistic and ethnic groups have deep historical roots in the ancient Near East. For millennia, the current Jewish and Christian minorities who speak the Semitic language called Aramaic, closely related to Hebrew and Arabic, have co-existed alongside communities, primarily speaking Iranian languages, such as Kurdish. Today the origin and development of this rich cultural-linguistic mosaic remains elusive due to superimposed nationalisms and paucity of historical records. Their languages, therefore, are an essential means to provide us with access into their past. In this long-lasting multilingual society, the use of each other’s languages has been an essential aspect of everyday life. Due to this linguistic and cultural entanglement of peoples, investigation into the linguistic history of Aramaic speaking minorities also holds the key to a greater understanding of the history of its now dominant neighbours. Therefore, a research unit of both Aramaic and Kurdish specialists is currently studying the intertwined histories of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities through their spoken dialects and linguistic heritage. A great deal of linguistic evidence comes from the recently richly enhanced documentation work on the spoken Aramaic languages at the University of Cambridge.

The three core questions that this research unit investigates are:

(1) How far back can we trace the history of the current spoken variation and can we discern different layers of history?
(2) What commonalities do the Aramaic and Iranian language varieties display and how should we account for them?
(3) How can we translate these findings into the reconstruction of historical scenarios?

To investigate these questions ALHOME combines state-of-the-art qualitative and quantitative techniques. The study of this historical period of multiculturalism and multilingualism requires us to develop new models of contact. The analysis of exchanges between Aramaic and Iranian speaking communities is expected to have important implications for our understanding of areal convergence and contact.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Four major themes of the ALHOME project are:

(1) Identification and analysis of commonalities;
(2) Reconstruction of linguistic history;
(3) The evaluation of contact scenarios and;
(4) Combining qualitative and quantitative research techniques.

At the start of the project, the ALHOME research unit compiled an Open Access collection of orally transmitted folklore in Kurdish and Aramaic (Geoffrey Khan; Masoud Mohammadirad; Dorota Molin & Paul M. Noorlander). Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2022). This showcases the social and cultural exchanges between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Middle East, as manifested in their shared repertoire of storytelling themes, motifs and techniques. Furthermore, the project has generated several case studies in which a language is maintained as a demarcation of communal identity in a multilingual setting, with two case studies focusing on the historical Jewish presence in the region. An urgent gap in our data has now been filled by the documentation of endangered dialect of the Jews of Dohok, describing an essential part of Jewish history in the west of the region (Molin, Dorota. The Neo-Aramaic of the Jews of Dohok: A Comparative and Typological Study, Leiden: Brill, forthcoming in 2024). Sanandaj, a town in western Iran, in turn, has formed the team’s starting point for the detailed study of contact between Aramaic speaking Jews and Iranian speaking Muslims (Khan, Geoffrey & Masoud Mohammadirad. Language Contact in Sanandaj. A Study of the Impact of Iranian on Neo-Aramaic, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023). The Jewish Aramaic dialect of the town displays different historical layers of contact with various Iranian languages over the course of many centuries. The Iranian languages in question are Gorani, Kurdish and Persian. Among these, Gorani has had a particularly deep impact on Jewish Aramaic, whereas the impact of Kurdish and especially Persian, remains superficial. Finally, the Jewish Aramaic evidence records a history of language shift from Gorani to Kurdish in the region. Furthermore, the ALHOME project seeks to combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches to linguistic history. The quantitative evidence helps us identify general and areal trends. Corpus based statistics is one of the tools available that can be used to study language variation and change in the study of word order, in particular. These studies reveal that some features of word order are more stable than others in language contact settings. These findings were presented at international conferences in Bamberg (2022) and Paris (2022). Another major finding of the talk was that Jewish dialects have borrowed body-part loanwords of Iranian origin at a rate far greater than Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects. Body-part loanwords of Iranian origin are ubiquitous across Neo-Aramaic, but they are particularly salient in the Trans-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects. In September 2023, the project organised a workshop bringing together experts in the field to discuss methodological challenges in our approaches to language contact.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The ALHOME project combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to capture the complexity of distinct historical layers across different contact zones.

Members of the Research Unit are preparing papers on the lexical diffusion across Neo-Aramaic dialects based on various datasets. The statistics measure the impact of borrowing on the lexicon, reflecting major differences among the various dialect groups, which are informative of the different social settings. At the same time, a dialectometric approach to these data will give insight into the similarities among dialects, identifying relevant areal clusters. This, in turn, also feeds into a computational phylogenetic analysis of Aramaic within the Semitic language family, currently in progress.

The contact situation between Aramaic and Iranian can be one of a high contact setting. In such a context, the well-known distinction between borrowing and imposition becomes blurred. For instance, the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Sanandaj has an extensively borrowed lexicon from Iranian and replicated considerably the syntax of Iranian. This reflects that borrowing and imposition can go hand in hand in contact situations, leading to convergence in all areas of grammar, which is not necessarily an expected outcome of either processes.

The work of the Research Unit will also have important ramifications for the historical grammar of Kurdish and Gorani. Members of the Research Unit are preparing papers on historical phonology of Gorani, accentual systems of Kurdish varieties, polysynthesis in Kurdish, as well as the coexistence of archaic and innovative (internal and contact-induced) forms in Iranian.

Map of Linguistic Region