On Tuesday, April 21st, the IAUNRC welcomed Dr. Eden Naby back to the IU campus for a new installment of her exhibit series about Assyrian language education and schooling in global diaspora populations. Dr. Naby, an Assyrian-Iranian American with a breadth of professional experience and area expertise from Afghanistan to the U.S. Assyrian diaspora, has dedicated her career to researching and documenting Assyrian-language textbook materials, as well as Assyrian populations throughout the globe. Her lecture served as an accompanying element to an exhibit put on display in the Scholars’ Commons of the Wells Library.
Aramaic is the oldest alphabetically written & spoken language in the world. As Dr. Naby explained, the Aramaic language became the lingua franca of the Middle East from the 7th century BCE to the 7th century CE with several populations speaking dialectical forms of Aramaic and utilizing distinct alphabets to write. Each of these alphabets has foundations within the Aramaic alphabet, ranging from Semitic languages and Iranian languages to Old Uighur, Mongolian, and other languages. Aramaic – as both a language and an alphabet – traveled along the Silk Road along with the merchants who spoke it and, thus, propagated the language’s reach and influence throughout the Arab World, Central Asia, and Eurasia.
Dr. Naby went on to delineate the history of Aramaic-speaking populations, adding context to the past two hundred years of the language’s history that serve as the exhibit’s focus. Assyrians are the last major speakers of Aramaic, with their homeland split between Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Distinct missionary groups’ evangelical efforts helped to pioneer the development of a written Aramaic language in northwest Iran, with American missionaries pioneering the written language’s progress ca. 1835. Dominican, Lazarist, Anglican, and Russian missionaries followed, which resulted in differing relationships between Vernacular Aramaic dialects – Sureth as the eastern and Surayt as the western – in addition to Classical Syriac. As the Syriac Orthodox historically focused on preserving Classical Syriac as a sacred – with Dominicans only teaching Classical and neglecting the vernacular, as well – liturgical language, dialects of vernacular Aramaic and Classical Syriac have a profound heritage of conciliating speakers’ cultural, linguistic, and religious identities.
As the exhibit illustrates, Assyrian diaspora populations underwent varying degrees of exposure to Assyrian culture, history, and Aramaic language education opportunities, with marked disparities in language learning accessibility between the U.S. and the Soviet diaspora groups. Challenges endured by the U.S. diaspora populations included intermittent language schooling opportunities and a severe lack of teachers, as most were transplants or immigrants themselves. Throughout the 20th century and beyond the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, there have been milestone achievements in preserving the future of Vernacular Aramaic. Among these successes are the establishment of an Aramaic-taught private school system in Australia and New Zealand and the worldwide use of digital learning materials from developers based in Syria starting in 2017. Most notably, the state of Illinois established an Assyrian language and culture program for secondary school students in Niles township in 2023.
Dr. Naby’s talk concluded with a lively Q&A session that expounded upon the relationship of Assyrian Christians and Orthodoxy to Nestorian Christianity, as well as language-of-education policy for Assyrians living in Iran, Iraq, Armenia, and parts of the Soviet Union. The future of both eastern and western dialects of Assyrian, she noted, depends on social mobility in all professional fields, particularly medicine and engineering.
The IAUNRC was pleased to have welcomed Dr. Naby back to the IU campus and to assist in facilitating her exhibit, which is available to view in the Scholars’ Commons of the Wells Library through the summer.
