Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq

Masoud Mohammadirad (PhD, New Sorbonne University, 2020) is a Research Associate in Kurdish language and linguistics at the University of Cambridge. His PhD thesis was a synchronic and diachronic study of pronominal clitics in modern West Iranian languages. His current research focuses on language contact between Iranian languages (Kurdish and Gorani) and Neo-Aramaic. He has published papers on Iranian linguistics in linguistic journals such as STUF, Folia Linguistica, and Folia Linguistica Historica.

Dorota Molin (PhD, University of Cambridge, 2021) is a Research Associate in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Lecturer in Biblical Hebrew Language at the University of Oxford. She has published on language contact in Semitic, Biblical Hebrew phonology and on issues in Neo-Aramaic syntax from a typological and diachronic perspective. Her doctoral thesis is a comparative grammar of a critically endangered Jewish Neo-Aramaic variety.

Paul M. Noorlander (PhD, Leiden University, 2018) is a Research Associate in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on Semitic languages, both ancient and modern. His main research concerns the typology of the endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects from an areal-diachronic perspective. He is the author of Ergativity and Other Alignment Types in Neo-Aramaic: Investigating Morphosyntactic Microvariation (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

Lourd Habeeb Hanna Chechman is a native speaker of Neo-Aramaic and fluent in different varieties of Kurdish. She has been working to rebuild trust between the different religious and ethnic communities of the region after the trauma of the invasion of Islamic State. She co-founded and was president of the Middle East Sustainable Peace Organization (2016-17). In 2018 she became the leader of a project on social cohesion for the Catholic Relief Services and USAID. She has also been a fellow in the United States Institute of Peace. Currently Lourd heads the Civil Society Initiatives Unit at the International Commission on Missing Persons in Iraq.

Aziz Emmanuel Eliya Al-Zebari (PhD, Salahaddin University, Erbil, 2018) is a lecturer in the English Department of the Catholic University of Erbil, Iraq. He was born in the village of Upper Gerbish in the area of Nekhla, North of Aqra. For his PhD thesis he documented the Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Aqra region.

Salim Disho Lazar Abraham is a freelance journalist working currently on a book on the most recent suffering of Assyrians at the hands of the Islamic State organization (ISIS.) He obtained his Master of Science degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York, USA, in 2006. He also holds a bachelor degree and post-graduate degree in English literature and Arabic-English translation from Aleppo and Damascus universities in Syria. He was born in the Assyrian quarter of Qamishli (north-eastern Syria), where almost all Assyrian dialects of Hakkari (south-eastern Turkey) were represented. He himself hails from Birij, Tkhuma, one of the largest tribes of Hakkari Assyrians.