Turoyo is a Modern West Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic. It is traditionally spoken in eastern Turkey and north-eastern Syria by members of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Turoyo language

From the word ţuro, meaning 'mountain', Ţuroyo is the mountain tongue of the Tur Abdin in southeastern Turkey. The language is a dialect of Modern Western Syriac, and is popularly called Suryoyo, or 'Syriac', by its speakers. Most Turoyo speakers use Classical Syriac, or Kthobonoyo, for literature and worship. Turoyo speakers are all traditionally members of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Until recently, Turoyo was a spoken vernacular and was never written down: Kthobonoyo was the written language. In the 1880s, various attempts were made, with the encouragement of western missionaries, to write Turoyo in the Syriac alphabet, in the Serto script used for West Syrian Kthobonoyo. However, with upheaval in their homeland through the twentieth century, many Turoyo speakers have emigrated around the world (particularly to Syria, the Lebanon, Sweden and Germany). The Swedish government's education policy, that every child be educated in his or her mother tongue, led to the commissioning of teaching materials in Turoyo. Yusuf Ishaq, thus, developed a written language for Turoyo that uses the Latin alphabet. The series of reading books and workbooks that use Ishaq's written Turoyo are called Toxu Qorena!, or "Come Let's Read!" This project has also produced a Swedish-Turoyo dictionary of 4500 entries: the Svensk-turabdinskt Lexikon: Leksiqon Swedoyo-Suryoyo.

Turoyo has borrowed many words from Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish. The main dialect of Turoyo is that of Midyat (Midhyoyo), in the east of Turkey's Mardin Province. The four villages of Midin, Kfarze, `Iwardo and Anhil, and the Raite (a cluster of seven small villages) all have distinctive Turoyo dialects (Midwoyo, Kfarzoyo, `Iwarnoyo, Nihloyo and Raityoyo respectively). All Turoyo dialects are mutually intelligible with each other. Many Turoyo speakers who have left their villages now speak a mixed dialect of their village dialect with the Midyat dialect. This mixture of dialects was used by Ishaq as the basis of his system of written Turoyo. For example, Ishaq's reading book uses the word qorena in its title instead of the Midhyoyo qurena or the village-dialect qorina. All speakers are bilingual in another local language. Church schools in Syria and the Lebanon teach Kthobonoyo rather Turoyo, and encourage the replacement of non-Syriac loanwords with authentic Syriac ones. Some church leaders have tried to discourage the use and writing of Turoyo, seeing it as an impure form of Syriac.

The Modern Western Syriac dialect of Mlahso and `Ansha villages in Diyarbakir Province is quite different from Turoyo. It is virtually extinct; its last few speakers live in Qamishli in northeastern Syria. See Mlahso language.

Appendices

References

• Heinrichs, Wolfhart (ed.) (1990). Studies in Neo-Aramaic. Scholars Press: Atlanta, Georgia. ISBN 1-55540-430-8.

Internal links

• Aramaic language.
• Mlahso language.
• Syriac alphabet.
• Syriac language.
• Tur Abdin.

External links

• Ethnologue report for Turoyo.
• Semitisches Tonarchiv: Dokumentgruppe "Aramäisch/Turoyo" (text in German).
• Yauno: The Syriac Community — Wie erkenne ich nicht-aramäische Wörter in Turoyo? (How do I recognise non-Aramaic words in Turoyo?)