Documentary evidence: 

• There is not a lot of evidence in Jewish Neo Aramaic that is written, but there are homilies (spiritual sayings and discourses) and bible translations from the 17th century (Khan 2018). “A small number of additional manuscripts exist from the following two centuries, but in large part, our knowledge of modern Jewish Aramaic comes only from the latter part of the 20th century when linguists began to document the many spoken varieties” (Rubin and Kahn 2021).

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Extent of scholarship on this language: 

• There is a considerable amount of scholarship on this language. Geoffrey Khan has written books on the Trans-Zab Neo-Aramaic languages as a whole, and also more specific books on dialects, such as the Urmi and Sanandaj dialects. There are also many articles on the language, an example being an article published by Cambridge University Press on Trans-Zab Jewish Neo Aramaic by Hezy Mutzafi.

 

Non-Jewish correlate:

• The co-territorial non-Jewish correlates are the Christian dialects of Neo-Aramaic, which would fall under the NENA languages and are from the same language family as Hulaula. The other NENA languages include the Christian varieties of Neo-Aramaic, which are famously mutually unintelligible with Jewish Neo-Aramaic. Even when in the same city, like Sanandaj, the two varieties are very different (Khan 2009). Jewish dialects in nearby towns are more similar to each other than the Christian and Jewish Neo-Aramaic spoken in one town, such as Sanandaj (Khan 2018).

• The co-territorial contact languages in the 1900s-1950s were mainly Persian and Kurdish, both of which fall under the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. Persian and Kurdish are not mutually intelligible with Trans-Zab Neo-Aramaic.

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Comparing Jewish Neo-Aramaic to Kurdish:

• Trans-Zab Neo-Aramaic, Sanandaj: 'agar 'ay-masta darenaf-o fka nošaf naps xara.

• Kurdish: Ger ez vî mastê dîsa bixim cihê xwe, wê nepaqijî bibe.

• English: If I pour this yogurt back into its own place, it will become unclean. (Khan 2009)

• The languages are not similar at all, but the word 'yogurt' is a loanword from Kurdish, and we see it appear in both sentences, masta in Sanandaj and mastê in Kurdish.

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Comparing Jewish Neo-Aramaic to Christian Neo-Aramaic:

• A phrase that demonstrates a difference between nearby Christian and Jewish dialects is ‘he/she pulled’ (Khan 2018).

• Christian Barwar

  • griš-le (he pulled) 

  • griša-le (she pulled)

• Jewish Sanandaj

  • grəš-le (he pulled)

  • gərš-a-le (she pulled)

• While the consonants are similar in each language, the shift of the vowel from /i/ to the schwa would make each phrase sound different in rapid vernacular. Additionally, the formation of the pattern here is different, especially in the ‘she pulled’, which is split into two for the C.Barwar and three parts for J.Sanandaj. Similar changes like these combine to make the two languages very distinct as a whole.

• The phrases ‘both of you’ and ‘the five of you’ differ even when the correlates exist in the same town. The infix -n is used in J.Sanandaj, and there are two forms of ‘both of you’ in J.Sanandaj (Mutzafi 2008).

• Jewish Sanandaj

  • tərnu ~ hartnu

  • xamšanu

• Christian Sanandaj

  • hatru

  • hárxamšāyu

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The repertoire of distinctive Jewish linguistic features: 

• Hebrew loanwords are most prevalent when it comes to religious domains and some euphemisms, as seen when analyzing the lexicon. Most general words derive from Kurdish, except for the lexicon related to food used on Jewish holidays, as well as the Jewish holidays themselves (Khan 2004).

• Euphemisms 

  • ta-hayme 'cemetery'- comes from bet haHayim, meaning 'house of life'

• Religious words

  • Bar/Bat mitzvah

  • mila (circumcision)

  • šamura (large unleavened bread)

  • maṣṣa (matza)

  • rošana (New Year)

• There are Hebrew loanwords, such as mila, meaning 'circumcision', which preserve an emphatic /l/ sound (Khan 2009).

• Hebrew and Rabbinic Aramaic words preserve the pharyngeal pronunciation of het (Khan 2009)

  • sohet 'ritual slaughterer'

  • maspaha 'family' 

  • hoxma 'wisdom' 

  • hänukae 'Hanukkah'

  • hames 'leaven' 

  • pasha 'Passover' 

  • psh 'to celebrate Passover' 

  • haliq 'haroset'

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Additional languages in contact:

• Kurdish and Persian numerals are often used instead of the original NENA ones (Khan 2009).

• Multiple loanwords, a large proportion of nouns are loanwords, coming from Kurdish, Persian, or Arabic. Sometimes, an -a is added to the end of the word to adapt to Aramaic (Khan 2009).

  • Masta (yogurt, in Kurdish, mast)

  • Para (feather, in Kurdish, par)

  • Zahamta (trouble, in Persian, zahmat)

  • Asna (acquaintance, in Persian, ašna)

  • Kasbi (earning, in Arabic, kasbi)

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Archaic features:

• In the Sanandaj dialect, there is a fossilized archaic component that applies in special cases when annexing nouns, which would be for example ‘the house of my friend’, which English would annex as ‘my friend’s house’. Archaic phrases are used in specific cases of annexation, where normally the nouns that are part of the annexation cannot be used independently in the dialect (Khan 2009).

  • at-xona 'wife of a brother' (cf. baxta 'wife', 'axona 'brother')

  • temona 'wife of paternal uncle' (cf. baxta 'wife', mama 'uncle')

  • at-e baba 'step-mother' (cf. baxta 'wife', tata 'father')  

• The Trans-Zab NENA dialects are generally the most innovative out of all the NENA dialects, and as a result, do not retain as many archaic features.

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Migrated regionalisms:

• Jewish dialects in different towns are more similar to each other than the Christian and Jewish dialects in the same town (Khan 2018).

• Shift of the interdental sounds /d/ and /t/ to /l/, which likely happened after dialectal fragmentation of NENA and likely developed in an area south of Rawanduz, in Arbel, and spread across the Trans-Zab region. It also could have been influenced by the Turkish dialect of Mukri from southern Iranian Azerbaijan, or even outside of it (Mutzafi 2008). The word bayta, meaning 'house', in Jewish NENA dialects turns to bela, whereas in Cis-Zab dialects (west of Zab) turns into beda, with the /d/ sound being preserved (Khan 2009). The language name Hulaula reflects this shift, from Hudautha.

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Other distinctive features:

• Another distinctive feature is that stress in a word generally moves to the word-final position (Khan 2009). In the same word bayta for 'house,' in Trans-Zab Jewish is bela with an accent on the a, and in Cis-Zab Jewish, beda with an accent on the e.

• Another distinctive feature is the collapse of gender distinction in 3rd-person singular (he/she becomes one word) (Khan 2009).

  • o in Hulaula

  • awa 'he' and aya she, in Cis-Zab

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Orthography: 

• The language is written in Hebrew script.

• Hebrew is technically an Assyrian script, Ashurit, which is derived from Aramaic script, so it is sort of roundabout.

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Sociolinguistic variation:

• Inter-speaker variation: Many dialects come under Hulaula, such as Sanandaj, Bijar, Suleymaniya, which demonstrate inter-speaker variation by region (Khan 2018).

• Intra-speaker variation: It is used as a secret language in present-day Israel by parents (Yousefnejadian 2022).

 

Contemporary status:

• 10,000 speakers remain in Israel (Lewis, Simons, Fennig 2015).

• The vast majority of speakers are advanced in age, and all dialects are endangered, with some already being extinct (Khan 2011).

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dialects were spoken by thriving communities of Christians and Jews across a wide area encompassing northern Iraq, north-western Iran, and southeastern Turkey (Khan 2007).

• Half of the approximately 500,000 Neo-Aramaic speakers died in an Ottoman campaign in WW1 (Khan 2019).

• No specific estimation for how many NENA speakers are grouped under Hulaula.

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Vernacular and post-vernacular uses by native and non-native speakers:

• Israel communities have some phone-in radio programs organized by speakers of Sulaymaniyah and Sanandaj, which include poetry readings and other cultural activities (Khan 2018).

• There are YouTube channels and Facebook groups dedicated to posting videos of current-day performances and information about Lishana Noshan, and an organization lobbying for the revitalization of the language also acts as a post-vernacular online center for the language (Sabar 2019).