The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Challa.

• Author: Haberl, Charles G.
• Position: Book review

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Challa. By STEVEN E. FASSBERG. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 54. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xvii + 314. $176.

In the field of linguistics, the first ten years of the twenty-first century have been defined by a growing movement to document the world's remaining spoken languages, of which perhaps a tenth have fewer than ninety-nine speakers and half will likely he extinct by the close of the century (statistics quoted from K. David Harrison, When Languages Die [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007]). This movement initially gained momentum as the millennium approached and numerous high-profile linguists drew the attention of both their colleagues and the general public to the threat of language endangerment (R. M. W Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997], 135-38, and David Crystal, Language Death [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000], 144-54 are representative in this regard). While the Middle East is not generally known for its linguistic diversity (in comparison with, say, the Amazon Basin, the Caucasus, or the island of New Guinea), it has nonetheless not escaped this global phenomenon, as the surviving spoken forms of formerly widespread and long-attested languages like Aramaic have become moribund or even extinct in recent years. Such is the case of the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Challa (today cukurca, Turkey), which is the subject of this volume.

The community of scholars actively engaged in documenting Neo-Aramaic is small (by my reckoning, there are only two dozen or so scholars thus engaged worldwide), but it has a scholarly pedigree of venerable antiquity, beginning with the pioneering contributions of mid-nineteenth-century European and American scholars like Emil Rodiger, Justin Perkins, D. T. Stoddard, Theodor Noldeke, Eduard Sachau, Eugen Prym, Albert Socin, and Arthur John Maclean. Furthermore, this community is extremely productive, having published over the last decade numerous monographs on dialects of Neo-Aramaic from all of the countries where they were formerly spoken. Apart from the present volume, some of the most recent works include Samuel Fox, The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Bohtan (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2009); Jared Greenblatt, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Amodiya (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Geoffrey Khan, The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Qaragosh (Leiden: Brill, 2002), The Jewish Nev-Aramaic Dialect of Sulemaniyycz and Ijalabja...