Who we are

Dr. Assaf Bar-Moshe is a linguist at the Institute of Semitic Studies (FU Berlin) specializing in Arabic dialectology and Jewish languages. His past work examined the Jewish dialects of Baghdad and ˁĀna, and his current DFG-funded research expands this to a comparative analysis of Judeo-Arabic dialects across Mesopotamia.

How we work

Researching Judeo-Arabic dialects today is uniquely challenging. Most native speakers left their communities, mostly to Israel, over seventy years ago, and few remain proficient. Many informants were children when they emigrated and have not used the dialects regularly since. As a result, these dialects cannot be documented through recordings alone. Instead, key grammatical features are identified and reconstructed through comparative analysis with better-documented and related dialects, allowing for a more accurate linguistic portrait despite the fragmented data.

Which results are most important

The study reveals not just linguistic features but also the social and historical dynamics of Jewish communities in the region. A striking example is the Jewish dialect of Mosul, which shows greater similarity to Anatolian dialects than to the Muslim dialect of the same city. This suggests that the Jewish community preserved older linguistic features while maintaining social boundaries from the surrounding Muslim population.

What remains to be examined

With the fieldwork and individual dialect analyses largely complete, the next phase focuses on comparative analysis and drawing broader historical and sociolinguistic conclusions across the dialect landscape.