Talk:Assyrian language

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved per request. - GTBacchus(talk) 23:47, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Assyrian language (disambiguation) → Assyrian language — Regardless of any dispute regarding the use of "Assyrian" to describe modern "Syriac," it should be undisputed that there's no reason to have the mainspace page linking to a disambig. The text here should simply be moved there, sans the disambig. -LlywelynII (talk) 11:49, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Support. Best way forwad in a complex and long standing edit war. There is probably no primary usage, and the onus of proof is on those who wish to assert that there is. Unlikely, so the DAB should be at the undisambiguated name as proposed. Andrewa (talk) 00:03, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

In defence of this article
I want to keep this article as a short disambiguation page with a consise but complete list of options. My involvement in this article has been just a handful of edits throughout 2005. These edits mainly link in with a number of articles I have been writing which link from here: namely Aramaic language, Syriac language, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and other modern Aramaic languages.

The original Assyrian language was the northern dialect of the Akkadian language. There will be instances that someone searching for Assyrian language will want to be directed to the article on Akkadian. At its hight, The Assyrian Empire adopted Aramaic language as a lingua franca. Therefore, in certain contexts, this period of Aramaic language can be referred to as Assyrian. This is strictly Ancient Aramaic, and not to be confused with any later dialects. Babylonian supremacy continued and developed the use of Aramaic throughout northern Mesopotamia. Besides Imperial Aramaic, there have always been many different dialects of colloquial eastern Aramaic spoken throughout Mesopotamia. In the Christian era, the city of Edessa became the leading light in Christian Aramaic culture. The dialect of Aramaic spoken at Edessa became normative for liturgy and literature for Aramaic-speaking Christians across a wide area. In all scholarly publications, this language is referred to as the Syriac language. Western and eastern dialect regions of Syriac (although both are still eastern Aramaic) developed, but the differences are mainly over pronunciation and orthography. Classical Syriac remains the language of liturgy, and, in the western dialect region, for literature. Some people refer to this language as Assyrian, which is reasonable in itself: it is the liturgical language of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, and is spoken by many Assyrians. However, such a labelling of this language is not only ambiguous, but against usual scholarly and historical practice. The various colloquial eastern Aramaic dialects spoken by Christian communities have been influenced by Syriac to greater or lesser degree, but also have a certain long history of being the demotic of their place. Skipping over some of the interesting peripheral languages in this category, the largest group is usually referred to as North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) in scholarly journals. Other names have been used by various scholars, but Sureth (in various dialects also Soreth, Suret, Soret), the traditional name for the language in the language is gaining currency. Scholars generally refer to smaller dialect groupings by geography (the Neo-Aramaic of Iranian Azerbaijan). Three important dialect centres of NENA have emerged over time. First to emerge was the dialect of Alqosh, which became the prestige dialect among the soth-western group of dialects. As almost all of those who speak these dialects are members of the Chaldean Catholic Church, the article is at Chaldean Neo-Aramaic. The second centre to emerge was in Urmia, at the north-eastern extreme of the region. The implementation of printing technology increased the importance of General Urmian over other dialects, except Alqoshi. During the turmoil in the mountains of eastern Turkey near the end of the First World War, many speakers of Neo-Aramaic fled into northern Iraq. There the admixture of village dialects and General Urmian produced Iraqi Koine. As Genral Urmian, Iraqi Koine and other dialects are mainly used by memebers of Assyrian Church of the East, it seems appropriate to refer to this dialect continuum as Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is the literary, as well as the colloquial language, of many who identify themselves as Assyrians, and thus could also be called the Assyrian language. The terms Chaldean Neo-Aramaic and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic are founded on the usage of Ethnologue, and are sometimes deprecated by scholars for having ethnic/sectarian labels, but I feel they are a useful middle way between those who want an identifiable label for the language and those who wish th label to distinguish properly between modern dialects. The revival of interest in a modern Assyrian identity has led to the term Assyrian language sometimes being used to include classical Syriac and literary and colloquial Sureth, and to emphasize comparative vocabulary between Akkadian and Sureth. The first connexion denies the historical development of Aramaic in the region, and actually hides the non-Syriac roots that exist for Neo-Aramaic. The second is mostly powered by wishful thinking, and utilises comparative vocabulary that would hold for a number of Semitic languages.

I apologize for writing an essay, but I hope that this clears up the position. There are a number of distinct languages that are called Assyrian. Each of these has a reasonable alternative name, which is usually more common than straight Assyrian, making disambiguation easy. I am equally against those who wish to remove references to Assyrian in modern contexts due to its ambiguity, and those who with to assert for political goals and so increase ambiguity beyond the bounds of reason. Gareth Hughes 12:06, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * the Syriac language article does not substantiate the claim that it is "sometimes" also referred to as "Assyrian language" in English. I can imagine that "Assyrian Neo-Aramaic" may sometimes be called "Assyrian" for short when the context is clear, but that's clearly a very marginal usage of "Assyrian language". The principal meaning by many orders of magnitude is clearly the East Semitic language of ancient Assyria. dab (𒁳) 17:38, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

An ambiguity that does not exist outside of Wikipedia
The word "Assyrian" means either of two things in the mainstream literature:
 * A dialect of the Akkadian language.
 * The Akkadian language in general.

The "Assyrian Neo-Aramaic" language is never referred to as "Assyrian" in an ambiguous way. The claimed ambiguity between Assyrian and the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic dialect exists only in Wikipedia.--HD86 (talk) 20:05, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Removed cite request
I found this discussion interesting and relevant to the material on Akkadian. This is not one of those articles. It is only a redirect. It says, in effect, "here is what we have under this name." There is nothing to discuss, nothing to prove, nothing to support or not support. You do all that in the articles. As long as those topics are in those articles the redirect belongs here. Cite requests are therefore not used in disambigs. If you think there are more articles, put them in. You can do a search on the word as well as anyone else. If the ref is to an article that does not mention this topic, take the ref out! If you want to argue the topic does not belong in the article, take it up in the article. What the disambig does not do is justify what redirects should be here. There's nothing to justify. It is an exist/non-exist binary situation. Either the topic is in the article under that name or one related or it is not. Thanks for your attention. Sounds like you are interested in working on it. Why don't you see how many appropriate articles you can find? An entry here is simple to do.Botteville (talk) 14:43, 15 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Why did you ignore my discussion section and open a new one? And more importantly: why did you force your edit when there is an open discussion?--HD86 (talk) 00:10, 19 December 2017 (UTC)