Sanandaj Jewish Neo-Aramaic

Sanandaj Jewish Neo-Aramaic is a variety of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic originally spoken by Jews in the city of Sanandaj, Iran. It is much more closely related to other Trans-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects than the Neo-Aramaic dialect spoken by Christians in the same town.^[1]

Sanandaj Neo-Aramaic
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Aramaic Eastern Aramaic Northeastern Sanandaj Neo-Aramaic
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–

Phonology

Consonants^[2]

		Labial	Dental / Alveolar	Palato-alveolar	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Laryngeal
Stops / affricates	Unvoiced	p	t	tʃ	k	q		ʔ
	Voiced	b	d	dʒ	g
	Emphatic		(ṭ)
Fricatives	Unvoiced	f	s	ʃ	x		ħ	h
	Voiced	w	z	ʒ	ɣ		ʕ
	Emphatic		(ṣ), (ż)
Nasal		m	n
Lateral			l (lˤ)
Rhotic			ɾ, r, (rˤ)
Approximant					j

The historically pharyngealized consonants /ṭ/ and /ṣ/ in the current language have merged with /t/ and /s/ in many environments but sometimes affect the pronunciation of surrounding vowels.^[3] /lˤ/ and /rˤ/ are consistently pharyngealized.^[4]

Grammar

Transitive verbs in the past tense are inflected for the oblique case with suffixes (which are prepositional phrases in origin), while intransitive verbs in the past tense are inflected by direct (nominative) suffixes.^[5] Object-verb (OV) word order is more common in Sanandaj than in some other dialects of Judeo Neo-Aramaic.^[6]