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Ṭuroyo
This survey offers a brief grammatical description of the Turoyo language spoken in the southeast of Turkey. Ṭuroyo is a largely unwritten Eastern Neo-Aramaic language, which derives its name from the Tur Abdin region. The Tur Abdin region, the ancient home of Ṭuroyo and the last remaining stronghold of Aramaic in the Republic of Türkiye, stretches eastward from the monastery of Mor Ḥananyo to the east of Mardin and is bounded on the North and East by the Tigris and the lowland plains to the south, roughly coterminous with the Syrian border. Within this region are roughly two thousand speakers of Ṭuroyo in Midyat and across a dozen or so villages to the north, east, and south of Midyat. All speakers of Ṭuroyo are members of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, which uses Syriac according to the West Syrian Rite as its liturgical language. As such, Syriac remains the literary register for most educated Ṭuroyo speakers, but there is a small but growing body of Ṭuroyo literature, primarily pedagogical texts for learning Ṭuroyo, local histories, and poetry. Speakers also use Ṭuroyo across other media, particularly social media. The sections of the survey include phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. In the final section, a sample text, a folktale, is provided.