Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.

The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

The detailed study of a rare Neo-Aramaic variety from north-eastern Iraq offered by Lidia Napiorkowska in A Grammar of the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw is a contribution to the documentation of the endangered world of spoken Aramaic. The comparative and contact-sensitive approach of the monograph situates the dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw in a wider context of Semitic languages on the one hand, and of the local varieties of Iraqi Kurdistan on the other. Next to a systematic account of phonology and morphology, the book covers a range of syntactic features and is accompanied by a corpus of translated texts and a glossary, arranged according to the Aramaic, as well as English entries.

The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects.

This study is the first wide-scope morpho-syntactic comparative study of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects to date. Given the historical depth of Aramaic (almost 3 millennia) and the geographic span of the modern dialects, coming in contact with various Iranian, Turkic and Semitic languages, these dialects provide an almost pristine "laboratory" setting for examining language change from areal, typological and historical perspectives. While the study has a very wide coverage of dialects, including also contact languages (and especially Kurdish dialects), it focuses on a specific grammatical domain, namely attributive constructions, giving a theoretically motivated and empirically grounded account of their variation, distribution and development. The results will be enlightening not only to Semitists seeking to learn about this fascinating modern Semitic language group, but also for typologists and general linguists interested in the dynamics of noun phrase morphosyntax.