The sociolinguistic landscape in the village of Urmia

The article describes the sociolinguistic landscape in the village of Urmia (Krasnodar Krai, Russia). Urmia is the only settlement in Russia with the majority of the population represented by ethnic Assyrians (Christian speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects). The sociolinguistic diversity among the Assyrians displays a wealth of various dialects, multilingualism and diglossia (the use of the so-called Classical Syriac as a language of religion, literature and culture) and makes the village a fascinating venue for linguistic studies. Unfortunately, until recently, researchers have failed to address the sociolinguistic problems of Neo-Aramaic languages in Russia. The present study is based on materials collected during two field trips to Urmia in 2019 and 2021. Our findings show Urmia to be a home for four ethno-dialect groups of Assyrians: Urmi (67 %), the so-called Shapətnaya (20.7 %), Nudəznaya (8.5 %) and Lewənaya (1.2 %). The group of Urmi-speaking Assyrians can be further subdivided into i) descendants of the Assyrians who arrived to Urmia around the time of its foundation in 1924, and ii) migrants from Armenia and Georgia who moved to the village in the 1990s. Among the Shapətnaya and Nudəznaya (ethno-dialect groups originating from the Hakkari mountain region in modern Turkey who moved to Russia following the genocide against Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire), there is a group originating from the town of Khanlar in the Azerbaijan SSR whose ancestors used to share residence with the local German diaspora to be later forcedly relocated to Siberia by the Soviet government. The majority of the Neo-Aramaic speakers are older than 30. We could find only six speakers born after 2000 who, however, do not even distinguish between the different Neo-Aramaic dialects and only refer to their idiom as lišana sureta (‘Assyrian languages’). None of the interviewed speakers understands the Classical Syriac language and only very few of them know the Syriac alphabet which is never practically used in Urmia. At the same time, Urmia residents sometimes resort to the Russian script for writing in Neo-Aramaic dialects.