Arabic Loanwords in the Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Ankawa

Salam Neamah Hirmiz Hakeem

1. Introduction

The Neo-Aramaic dialect of Ankawa belongs to the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) subgroup. It is spoken by a Christian minority in the town adhering to the Chaldean Catholic Church, who refer to it by the term Suret or Sureth. Ankawa is located to the North of the city of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where Kurdish is the dominant means of communication.

Aramaic, the ancestor of Sureth, and Arabic are genetically related in that they both belong to the Semitic language family. As we shall see, however, this does not seem to be the primary cause of the introduction of an extensive number of Arabic words in the speech of the Sureth-speakers of Ankawa. This is because there are so many more Arabic words in the speech of the young than in that of the older generation. So the crucial factor must be the current social situation rather than the linguistic affinity of the two languages.

2. Research Data

The source of the majority of the data presented in this paper is my own native-speaker knowledge of the Sureth of Ankawa. I am also a speaker of Arabic as a second language. The data and analyses have been verified through various audio recordings of interviews and spontaneous conversations that have been elicited from other native speakers of Ankawa Sureth of different ages.

3. Findings and Discussion

Versteegh (2001, 473) states that:

In borrowing speakers are primarily interested in lexical items from another language, which are either perceived to be more prestigious than the lexical equivalents in their own language, or for which their own language has no equivalents at all.

This seems to be true with regard to a large number of Arabic loanwords that can be heard in the speech of the young Sureth-speakers in Ankawa. The young generation have started to consider Arabic as a more prestigious language than their mother tongue on account of the wider use of Arabic and its richer vocabulary. They have, moreover, studied academic subjects such as physics and biology in Arabic and do not know equivalents to the technical terminology in Sureth. The common genetic origin of the two languages facilitates the process of borrowing, since in many cases the Arabic loanwords do not sound very different from their own native vocabulary, e.g.

It is not clear when exactly this process of borrowing started, but we can deduce from the nature of the loanwords that the Arabic public education and local television channels during the middle of the twentieth century played a pivotal role in initiating and facilitating this process. Although nowadays the educational system has shifted to Kurdish instead of Arabic and there is no immediately neighbouring Arab community, we can still notice an increase in the use of Arabic loanwords by the Sureth-speakers of Ankawa. This may be ascribed to the remaining influence of schooling and education, which were predominantly in Arabic until the end of the last century, in addition to the television channels and other media that still involve an extensive use of Arabic. As a result, most of the technical words used in the region, including those used by other sections of the population, such as Kurds, Turkmens, Yezidis, are Arabic. Another more recent and prevailing source for more Arabic loanwords is social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, in which Arabic is the predominant means of communication.

It can be observed that in the majority of cases the Arabic loanwords have not undergone any phonological changes. This is in agreement with Thomason and Kaufman’s assumption that ‘the more the borrowing speakers come to know the foreign language, the more they tend to take over the foreign phonological elements in an unadapted form’ (1988, cited in Versteegh, 2001, 476). Furthermore, morphological borrowing occurs in loanwords, particularly in the use of Arabic plural forms of nouns, whether regular or broken, e.g. ʾiḥtimālāt ‘possibilities’ and ʾaḥwāl ‘conditions’. Sometimes borrowed Arabic nouns are used either with their Arabic plural form or with the Sureth plural inflection (see §4.1 below), e.g. kutub ~ kitābānə ‘books’.

The following sections present a classification and analysis of the most common Arabic loanwords that I have noticed as a native speaker in conversations and in the interviews with Sureth-speakers in Ankawa. The source of loanwords is Modern Standard Arabic rather than Iraqi dialectal Arabic. This is because this is the variety of Arabic that the people of Ankawa have been mostly exposed to. The counterpart of the Arabic words in Ankawa Sureth is provided when available. In some cases, however, there is no counterpart in Ankawa Sureth as far as can be established.

4. Nouns

The vast majority of the Arabic nouns have been borrowed into Sureth in their singular form without any modification or inflection. Those for which a counterpart in Ankawa Sureth can be identified include the following:

Examples of borrowed Arabic nouns for which there is no clear counterpart in Ankawa Sureth are the following:

There are, however, also Arabic roots that are used with Sureth noun patterns (especially as verbal nouns), e.g.

In some both the original Arabic form and Arabic root with a Sureth morphological pattern are used interchangeably, e.g.

It is worth mentioning that the majority of borrowed nouns retain their Arabic plural forms, whether sound feminine, sound masculine or broken, e.g.

There are also a few Arabic nouns that are modified and inflected with Sureth plural suffixes, e.g.

Moreover, we can also find various borrowed nouns that have both the Arabic and Sureth plural forms, respectively, e.g.

5. Verbs

The Arabic verbs that are borrowed into Sureth involve an Arabic root that is inflected with Sureth morphological patterns. In what follows the verbs are cited in the form of the third person singular masculine past form. In some cases there is a semantic counterpart in the Sureth of Ankawa, e.g.

In many cases, however, no exact counterpart in Ankawa Sureth can be identified, e.g.

Furthermore, Sureth speakers of Ankawa often use Arabic nouns preceded or, more often, followed by a Sureth light verb such as wədlə ‘did’ and wəllə ‘gave’ to produce compound verbs, e.g.

Examples of such hybrid compound verbs without clear counterparts in Ankawa Sureth include the following:

The Sureth of Ankawa has a basic SVO word order. Such compound verbs, however, generally have the light verb after the object and this suggests that their syntax has been influenced by Kurdish. Sureth speakers in Ankawa also know the local Kurdish, which is an SOV language. In Kurdish also compound verbs with borrowed Arabic nouns and light verbs are in use. The light verb is regularly placed after the noun, in accordance with the normal Kurdish word order, e.g.

Arabic verbs with Arabic morphological inflection are occasionally used in Sureth. One example is the expression of attitude ʾaʿtaqid ‘I think’, the Sureth counterpart for which is xəšboni.

6. Adjectives

In Arabic the singular masculine is the basic form of the adjective. It is this form that is borrowed by speakers of Ankawa Sureth and used in all contexts, e.g.

Examples of loaned Arabic adjectives without exact Sureth counterparts include:

Sabar (1984, 206) states that in Neo-Aramaic dialects in general ‘native adjectives agree with the qualified noun or pronoun in singular masculine and feminine, but in plural the masculine form serves both masculine and feminine . . . but in the case of borrowed adjectives, the singular masculine is used invariably with all four categories.’ The same agreement patterns are found in the Sureth of Ankawa. For instance, when using native adjectives, we find examples such as ʾubra yarīxa ‘tall boy’, brāta yarixta ‘tall girl’, nāšə yarīxə ‘tall people’. However, when using Arabic loanwords, we would hear forms like ʾubra baṣīṭ ‘simple boy’, brāta baṣīṭ ‘simple girl’, nāšə baṣīṭ ‘simple people’.

To produce the comparative form, the Ankawa Sureth speakers use the word bəš ‘more’ followed by the borrowed adjectives, e.g. bəš baṣīṭ ‘more simple’, bəš ṣarīḥ ‘more frank’. Sometimes, however, they apply the Arabic comparative morphological pattern to the loaned adjective, e.g.

7. Adverbs

Ankawa Sureth uses borrowed Arabic adverbs of time, place, and manner, e.g.

Cases where there are no clear Sureth equivalents include:

As we can see above, most of the adverbs of manner are expressed by nouns in the accusative case (cf. Sabar 1984, 206). There are also various loaned Arabic adverbs of manner that are composed of nouns preceded by prepositions, e.g.

Some of these are used as heads of adverbial clauses, e.g.

8. Function Words

In addition to the extensive lexical borrowing that has been demonstrated above, various instances of borrowing of grammatical function words can be also found.

Many such borrowed function words are conjunctions or discourse markers, e.g.

Arabic ordinal numerals are another group of loanwords that are widely used, especially by the young generation, in preference to the equivalent Sureth forms. This applies to the ordinals first to tenth:

For the ordinal numerals of eleventh and above only the Sureth forms are in use, e.g.

It is noteworthy that the Arabic forms precede nouns, in accordance with Arabic grammar, whereas the Sureth forms follow the nouns, e.g.

Other modifiers relating to ordering and addition that are loaned in Sureth are the following:

The borrowed and native forms follow the same patterns as above, e.g.

9. The Future of Ankawa Sureth

Khan (2007, 106–7) states that after the Arab conquests most of the Aramaic speakers of Iraq either started to adopt Arabic, or their speech was gradually Arabicised. Although the transition from Aramaic to Arabic was in some cases slow, this was a continuous process which was fastest in the central and southern areas of Iraq. Spoken Aramaic mostly survived among the Christian and Jewish communities in the North of Iraq.

Ankawa is one of the towns in the North where this language has survived to this day. Will, however, this situation remain the same in the future?

Versteegh (2001, 501–2) states that in various cases ‘Arabic was taken over [by speakers] in the same process of acculturation that brought Islam, and in most areas Arabic became at first the second, and then the first language of the inhabitants.’ Unlike the situation in such cultures, the Sureth speakers of Ankawa seem to have borrowed the Arabic words without being influenced by the Arab Islamic culture, either because they have retained their Christian faith or because they have been influenced by the communist thought that prevailed in the eighties and nineties of the last century as well as the atheistic ideas that are becoming globally more prevalent. The situation is similar to various Christian minorities in the Middle East where, as Bohac (2010, 24) puts it, ‘most existing Christian groups resisted Islamization, but they cannot resist Arabization.’

Versteegh points out that in several situations where there was an extensive borrowing and interaction between a minority language and Arabic within Arabic-speaking regions, the minority language became extinct. This applied, for example, to Coptic in Egypt. In fact, this has already happened to many former Sureth speakers in the city of Mosul, who have almost lost not only Sureth their mother tongue but also their identity as Syriacs, since the majority believe that they are Christian Arabs. In reality, the current displacement of these Arabic-speaking Christians from Mosul to Ankawa in the wake of the invasion of ISIS and their fear of returning due to the relative instability of the region has created a new status quo that adds an extra pressure on Sureth speakers in Ankawa, who have no choice but to use Arabic most of the time when they are outside. Thus, gradually and subconsciously, they are replacing more and more Sureth words with Arabic ones. Besides, many Ankawi families have emigrated to Europe, the USA or Australia because of the instability of the region. This has created even further pressure on this vulnerable dialect.

Could what happened to Mosul be repeated in Ankawa if the rate of the Arabic loanwords continues to increase with the coming generations, or will they be speaking a hybrid variety that basically has Arabic lexical items inflected with Sureth morphology?

10. Conclusion

O’Connor (1986, 220) states that ‘the vast majority of loans in any language are nouns.’ As it can be seen from the material that is presented above, nouns make up the majority of the Arabic loanwords in the Sureth of Ankawa. The next most common set of loanwords are Arabic verbal roots and Arabic nouns within compound verbal constructions with light verbs. Adjectives follow as the third group of loanwords in terms of their frequency and adverbs are the last.

In addition to the extensive borrowing of Arabic content words, Ankawa Sureth speakers have borrowed various Arabic function words, such as conjunctions and ordinals, which have become integral parts of the dialect.

It is interesting that though Ankawa is within the confines of a neighbouring Kurdish-speaking community, Ankawa Sureth is full of Arabic loans and has only a relatively small number of Kurdish ones. This is a result of the fact that education was entirely in Arabic until the last decade. This is reflected in particular in the fact that most of the Arabic loanwords are technical terms used in education, which in general do not have any counterparts in Ankawa Sureth. Another more recent source for these Arabic loanwords are the media, especially television programmes and social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, in which Arabic is the major means of communication. Moreover, the recent displacement of many Arabic-speaking Christians from Mosul to Ankawa has added a new stimulus for borrowing. This has been accompanied by the immigration of numerous Ankawi people abroad, making the situation even more difficult for Sureth to thrive.

Could this dialect survive under the pressure of the increasing number of Arabic words used by the new generation in Ankawa? As a matter of fact, there have been several attempts to encourage the use of Sureth vocabulary and reduce the number of Arabic loanwords, but they do not seem to have had any effect on the increasing preference for the use of Arabic words, which are considered more expressive and versatile. The proportion of Arabic loanwords is, therefore, constantly increasing and the Sureth of Ankawa should be considered an endangered dialect of NENA.

References

Boháč, Artur. 2010. ‘Problems of Studying Christian Minorities in the Islamic Middle East’. Folia Geographica 15: 15–26.

Khan, Geoffrey. 2007. ‘Aramaic in the Medieval and Modern Periods’. In Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern, edited by Nicholas Postgate, 95–114. Cambridge: The British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

O’Connor, Michael. 1986. ‘The Arabic Loanwords in Nabatean Aramaic’. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45 (3): 213–29.

Sabar, Yona. 1984. ‘The Arabic Elements in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Texts of Nerwa and ʿAmādīya, Iraqi Kurdistan’. Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1): 201–211.

Versteegh, Kees. 2001. ‘Linguistic Contacts between Arabic and Other Languages’. Arabica 48 (4): 470–508.