Excavating, documenting, and analyzing linguistic relics: What do the Jewish Arabic dialects of Mesopotamia teach us about the (linguistic) history of the region?

For more than a millennium, Jewish minorities were speaking their own dialects of Arabic in Mesopotamia, especially dialects of qǝltu type. While some of these dialects were object to previous research, others are still undocumented. The project comes to fill this gap and document under- or undescribed Jewish qǝltu dialects through field work. Depending on the extent and quality of the data that the field work will allow to collect, a grammatical sketch of the newly documented dialects will be aspired, together with a collection of texts. In addition, the project aims to carry a comparative analysis of the Jewish qǝltu dialects and to define the features that set them apart from the rest of the qǝltu family. The results of such analysis will enable to observe which dialects are more related to others and to confirm whether a Jewish dialect continuum had existed in the region. It might also allow to confirm whether the Jewish dialects in Mesopotamia and in the northern part of the Levant stem from a common ancestor and/or have been in contact despite the vast geographical span in which they were scattered.