Talk:Assyrian people/Introduction

Assyrians are an ethnic group whose origins lie in what is today Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, but many of whom have migrated to the Caucasus, North America and Western Europe during the past century. Hundreds of thousands more live in Assyrian diaspora and Iraqi refugee communities in Europe, the former Soviet Union, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

The Assyrians are believed to have descended from the ancient Akkadians, who, starting with Sargon of Akkad, emerged as the ruling class of Assyria. Eventually conquered Aramaean tribes were assimilated into Assyrian society, and their language, Aramaic, supplanted the native Akkadian language, due in part to the mass relocations enforced by Assyrian kings of the Neo-Assyrian period. The modern Assyrian identity is therefore believed to be a miscegenation, or ethnogenesis, of the the major ethnic groups which inhabited Assyria-proper, which were, for the most part, Assyrian, and to some extent, Aramaean. By the 5th century BC, "Imperial Aramaic" had become lingua franca in the Achaemenid Empire.

Most Assyrians speak a modern form of Syriac, an Eastern Aramaic language whose dialects include Chaldean and Turoyo as well as Assyrian. All are classified as Neo-Aramaic languages and are written using Syriac script, a derivative of the ancient Aramaic script. Assyrians also may speak one or more languages of their country of residence.

As a result of persecution, mostly during the last century, there is now a significant Assyrian diaspora. Major events included the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Simele massacre, and the Assyrian genocide that occurred under Ottoman Turkish rule in the early 1900s. The latest event to hit the Assyrian community is the war in Iraq; of the one million or more Iraqis reported by the United Nations to have fled, forty percent are Assyrian, despite Assyrians comprising only three to five percent of the Iraqi population.