Death of a Dialect

The recent Jewish history of Baghdad is a sad one, and it is nearly at its end. There are only four Jews remaining in the city, and they are all elderly, with no families to replace them. When they die, everything that they have carried on from their ancestors for more than two thousand years will die with them. The decline played out over the course of several generations: in the mid-twentieth century there were about one hundred eighty thousand Jews living in Iraq. About one hundred twenty thousand of them left after the creation of Israel (an event which prompted the Iraqi government to strip Jews of their citizenship and freeze their assets). Over the course of the next several decades, the remaining few thousand trickled out of the country, leaving about eighty by the turn of the century, according to the Jewish historian Mir al-Basri, who himself left the country in the Seventies and settled in London. The American invasion in 2003 only made matters worse. Ever since then, the city’s nearly extinct Jewish population has lived in a state of utmost duress.

When I visited Baghdad earlier this year, I had no expectation of meeting any of these remaining Jews. I was, however, interested in their language, a particular dialect of Baghdadi, which is itself a subdialect of Arabic. It will also die with them (at least in the city of Baghdad). And it is not the only dialect in Baghdad that is endangered. The tens of thousands of Christians in the city are also losing their unique dialect. Its fate is tied to the people who speak it, but even their continued presence in the city doesn’t guarantee that their dialect will survive, as it melds into the dominant Muslim one. At the same time, emigration is the most pressing threat to Christianity’s continued existence in Baghdad. Some denominations are struggling to maintain their churches in light of a population decline. Those changes are reflections of a larger shift in Baghdad, where it is harder than ever to live as a minority. The study of these dialects might seem to be of minor importance in comparison with the larger issues facing Christians and Jews, but their language is a living symbol of a long and rich history that is in danger of dying out.

Understanding how Baghdad got to this point requires something of a linguistic history lesson. Baghdadi Arabic fits into the larger family of Mesopotamian Arabic, which covers the spoken dialects used roughly across modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and the Ahvaz region of Iran. Linguists divide this family into two subgroups, based on how they pronounce the word meaning “I said”: qeltu dialects historically were used mostly in northern Mesopotamia and gelet dialects once were found largely in southern Mesopotamia, but now are coming to dominate spoken Arabic across Mesopotamia. The latter now threaten the extinction of the former.

The evidence available suggests that Baghdadis once spoke a qeltu dialect. At some point between the Middle Ages and the modern era, however, the dialect underwent a shift from its historical qeltu to a gelet. Linguists have outlined various theories, but it is likely that after the Mongol invasions (Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258 and again in 1401), the city was largely emptied of its population, and many of its native inhabitants left. For the Muslim population of Baghdad, the gelet dialect of southern Iraq became dominant, likely reflecting an influx of southerners and Bedouins. There is also the possibility that a famine in the early nineteenth century led to an influx of non-Baghdadis in the city, which would also have re-inforced the gelet dialect. Linguistic similarities between the modern Jewish dialect of Baghdad and the dialect of Aleppo suggest that at least a sizable portion of Baghdad’s Jews went to Aleppo for several centuries before returning to their native city during the Ottoman era. They brought back with them a modified qeltu Baghdadi Arabic, but one closer to that originally found in the city than the gelet dialect that had taken over since the seventeenth century. Christians also continued to speak a qeltu dialect, possibly brought from the city of Mosul.

In the modern era, three major Arabic dialects emerged in the city: Jewish Baghdadi, Christian Baghdadi, and Muslim Baghdadi, the former two qeltu dialects reminiscent of medieval Baghdad, while Muslims spoke a gelet dialect, reminiscent of southern and Bedouin dialects. The state of affairs held into the mid-twentieth century, but it bears little resemblance to the linguistic picture of Baghdad today. The twentieth century upended Baghdadi society as much as it did the rest of the Middle East. In 1917, the Ottoman government estimated Baghdad’s population to be around two hundred thousand, including one hundred thousand Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims; eighty thousand Jews; twelve thousand Christians; and eight thousand Kurds. Other estimates from the same era vary wildly, but the proportions between groups are generally along these lines. The Jews in particular were no token minority, but rather an essential part of the city’s life. This diversity was reflected in the language its residents spoke. The Muslim dialect remained dominant, however, and Christians and Jews normally spoke in the Muslim dialect when dealing with Muslims, and used their own distinct dialect when in their own communities.

In 1964, the Israeli linguist Haim Blanc published a book called Communal Dialects of Baghdad, based on field research with the Baghdadi Jewish community that had settled in Israel, as well as recordings of Muslim and Christian Baghdadis speaking Arabic. It defined scholarly understanding of the linguistic picture of the city, and in 1991, Farida Abu-Haidar—herself of Baghdadi Christian parentage—followed up with a more complete study of the Christian dialect, called Christian Arabic of Baghdad. She was living in London at the time, and interviewed Baghdadi Christians there. She also obtained recordings of Baghdadi Christians still living in Baghdad. In interviewing those whose families were native to Baghdad, she found a dialect that largely resembled what Haim Blanc had documented in the 1960s, though with increased influence from the surrounding Muslim dialect among the younger generation of Christians. I had these studies in mind when I set off to Baghdad in October 2022 to learn more about the current state of the city’s language. I expected to find Christians still speaking this dialect, with a younger generation perhaps adopting a more neutral or Muslim-influenced accent. And I certainly didn’t expect to find any Jews. From news reports, I knew there were a few left, but I didn’t think it would be realistic to track them down given that they largely keep their identity hidden from outsiders. I was surprised on both counts.

I arrived in Baghdad with a list of Christian contacts (several priests, researchers, and professors of Christian language and history). I was also planning to knock on the doors of as many churches as I could to talk to people, hear them talk, and talk to families who were originally from Baghdad. I was interested in speaking to Christians whose families had come from elsewhere, to see whether they adopted the Christian Baghdadi dialect or a more neutral dialect when they arrived in the city, but it turned out that it’s difficult to find any Christians in Baghdad whose families are originally from the city. Over the course of ten days, I spoke to every Christian I could find about his or her family origins and the linguistic features that characterized their home lives. I didn’t meet a single Christian who claimed to have Baghdadi origins. Almost everyone said that his family came from Mosul and spoke the dialect of that city, with some others claiming origins in the Aramaic-speaking villages of the Kurdistan Region or Turkey. I had been warned that this would be the case. I didn’t realize that it would be a nearly impossible task to find anyone in the Christian community there whose family history in Baghdad dated to before about 1950. After dozens of conversations in which I was told that I would not find a Christian of Baghdadi origin in Baghdad, I was ready to give up my search. By chance, however, I finally found a person who lived what Haim Blanc and Farida Abu-Haidar documented in their books. That is, someone of purely Baghdadi origin (at least back to the Ottoman era) who could verify that the Christians of Baghdad did indeed speak a qeltu dialect resembling both the dialect of Mosul and the dialect of Baghdadi Jews.

Talal Kilano is a retired professor of psychology who grew up in the Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada to parents of Baghdadi extraction. When I met him, I told him he was a difficult person to find, a proper Baghdadi Christian. He expressed surprise, saying that there were many Christians like him of Baghdadi origin, but I protested that walking into a random church in Baghdad, one is almost certain to find a priest of Mosuli origins, who only knows people also originating from Mosul. I had asked people from a wide variety of denominations: Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Roman Catholic, and the Ancient Church of the East.

When I first met Kilano, his accent was hard to distinguish from those around him. When we sat down to our interview, however, he said he would speak in the Baghdadi Christian dialect he grew up using with his family. His descriptions of the language of Baghdad’s Christians confirmed much of what was documented in the twentieth century, a narrative of which I had struggled to find evidence in Baghdad today. Even still, Kilano is often mistaken for someone from Mosul. “Even when I get into a taxi,” he told me, “if I say a word or two, and the driver is perceptive, he knows right away that I am not from Baghdad, that I’m from Mosul. He doesn’t know that I’m from Baghdad originally.” Kilano’s parents actually spoke Aramaic as their first language, but raised their children in an Arabic speaking household. Baghdad’s Christian dialect was a living dialect, still capable of integrating newcomers into it.

Kilano confirmed, however, that his generation is the last to speak the specific Baghdadi Christian dialect, saying that the newer generation have begun to speak the dominant Muslim dialect of Baghdadi Arabic. “This is a sad story also,” he said. Young people often adapt more to the language of their peers than their parents, causing the Christian dialect to be absorbed into the dialect of the surrounding society. Kilano blamed parents as well for not passing this along to their children, causing a loss of Christian identity. In his view, this was a symptom of a larger problem where the younger generation is less tied to their Christian identity, and therefore their Christian values, than previous generations.

When I finished my interview with Kilano, we walked back in the direction of his house and my path onwards in the city. As we passed the Chaldean Catholic cathedral of Baghdad, Mar Yousif (that is, Saint Joseph), it was obvious that an event of some kind was happening. It was a Monday, and the gathering was much too large for a daily Mass. It turned out that to celebrate the two-year anniversary of Pope Francis’s visit to Iraq, a number of bishops from France, including the archbishop of Paris, were on a follow-up visit. We entered the church, and watched as about two dozen priests—Iraqi and French alike—concelebrated Mass in French, Arabic, and Syriac. Of the priests on the altar, I had spoken to three during my search for Baghdad’s historical Christians; all grew up in Baghdad to parents from Mosul. By the time I found Kilano, I had knocked on the door of about ten churches in Baghdad and had yet to find anyone who explicitly remembered the Christian dialect of Baghdadi Arabic. Most didn’t know it had ever existed. A few said that anyone who would remember the Christian presence in Agd al-Nasara and similar neighborhoods in the older part of Baghdad would be elderly, and most of them left Baghdad after the American invasion.

Ultimately, my study of the Baghdadi Christian Arabic dialect led to more questions than answers. (The subject is still wide open for a graduate student in Semitic linguistics looking for an interesting topic, though the security situation in Iraq severely limits academic work.) As for the Jewish dialect, I had planned to study its heritage through books. But, during my search for those who spoke the Christian dialect, an Iraqi priest made a surprising offer: he could introduce me to an Iraqi Jew. I hadn’t thought this possible, so I readily agreed.

We met in a discreet location, and she brought a Christian couple with her who knew her identity as one of Iraq’s Jews. To outsiders, she usually identifies herself as Christian, a safer answer than Jewish despite the hardships that Iraq’s Christian community has gone through in recent years. Even among Christian clergy, she says, she has heard anti-Semitic comments and therefore generally keeps her identity secret. This woman grew up in an already dying community. She was born after most Iraqi Jews left in the early 1950s. Nonetheless, she said that the community still filled one synagogue in her childhood (as opposed to the about thirty-five synagogues that Baghdad had before most of the Jews left). Men prayed downstairs and women upstairs, and prayers were largely in Aramaic. As such, she said, she can understand much of the Syriac prayers used in many of Baghdad’s churches. After the last rabbi left in the 1970s, a hazzan, or cantor, led prayers for the community. Now, she conducts the prayers, mostly by herself.

She spent most of the interview describing in minute detail the many holiday traditions that she still carries on. For example, for the Jewish New Year, cucumbers, apples, and honey are standard, as they come directly from the earth. She also throws bread into the water to feed fish, who, like God, do not have eyelids so they are always watching. For Purim, she eats pastries called odhn al-Haman, or the ears of Haman. For Passover, unleavened bread and raisin wine. (Later, the woman sent me photos of her preparations for Sukkot and invited me to join. I wasn’t able to participate, but was again struck by her commitment to keep on traditions that would likely die with her, at least in Iraq.) I played her a recording of an Iraqi Jew speaking his dialect, and she told the couple who came with her that this was their dialect. It resembled the dialect of Mosul, she said, and pointed out some of the words that were unique to Baghdad’s Jews. She said that the four remaining Jews of Baghdad, when together, still speak in this dialect. I didn’t have the opportunity to hear this in practice, and I imagine the dialect is diluted from what it once was, but I could be wrong.

Hers is not an easy life. Particularly since 2003, the Jewish community has suffered greatly. She shared details that she asked me not to print, but suffice it to say that being a Jew in Baghdad today presents one of the most difficult sets of circumstances one can imagine. I asked why her parents didn’t leave along with everyone else, and she said that at the time life in Iraq was good. “Not like now,” she said.

When I finished the interview, I walked back to my hotel. It was only then that the weight of what had just happened began to sink in. I couldn’t help but see the oppressor in the faces of everyone I passed. Why does this woman have to keep her identity secret when she’s part of a line that extends far beyond both Islam and Christianity? Only one hundred years ago, there were almost as many Jews as Muslims in this city. Jews first arrived in Iraq during the Babylonian exile in 597 B.C. For more than twenty-five hundred years they were an essential part of the country’s fabric, and Iraqi Jewry was fundamental in the development of Judaism worldwide. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in what is now Iraq in the sixth century A.D. In northern Iraq, many Jews (as well as Christians) continued to speak Aramaic, a relic of Iraq’s pre-Islamic and pre-Arab past, and some still speak that language in Israel and elsewhere. In Baghdad and elsewhere, they adopted Arabic along with the rest of the population. Long after medieval Baghdadi Arabic ceased to exist, the Jews carried a remnant of that past in their unique dialect. All of that is coming to an abrupt end, and I had the immense honor of meeting one of the last vestiges of that history.

A day or two later, I visited my favorite bookshop in Baghdad, just off Tahrir Square. I explained to the owner that I was looking for books on Jewish history in Baghdad, specifically on language, if such a thing existed. He showed me some books on Iraq’s Jewish history, but then he took me out into the street and pointed out some of the houses that once were owned by Jews in the neighborhood. I explained to him that I was working on their language specifically, and he was surprised to hear that they had their own dialect. The man, probably in his sixties, had grown up in a Baghdad where only a handful of Jews remained. His father, no doubt, would have been able to identify the unique Jewish dialect spoken in the streets of Bataween, which sits to the southeast of Tahrir Square and the man’s bookshop. Now others inhabit those houses, largely without the permission or knowledge of the original owners, though one Christian resident said that he had neighbors who had agreed with the Jewish owners of their house that they would return it to them if they ever came back. (That agreement will remain a hypothetical, as the reality is simply that Jews will probably never return to Baghdad, at least not in the foreseeable future.) It’s unclear whether the Christians themselves will remain. The twentieth century saw the end of the Jewish community in Baghdad, and the twenty-first century threatens to bring about the end of the Christian population.

It may seem that the nuanced linguistic differences between Baghdad’s various sects are an issue of obscure academic interest, but the linguistic shift in Baghdad over the twentieth century is emblematic of much larger demographic and social changes. The disappearance of the medieval qeltu Baghdadi dialect in favor of a Bedouin and southern-influenced gelet was reflective of a massive shift. Bedouins and southerners entered the city from the Mongol invasions onwards, accelerated in the modern era, and formed a critical mass that caused the disappearance of Baghdad’s traditional dialect amongst the Muslims of the city. It was likely the social isolation of Christians and Jews that protected them from this trend, though we might see a parallel in the dominance of Mosul’s dialect among Baghdad’s Christians today.

The linguistic evolution is reflective of a trend within Arab society generally, one that some Arab thinkers have termed the “ruralization” of cities rather than urbanization of rural populations. Writing in 2014, the Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh pointed to the massive growth of Syria’s cities over the course of the twentieth century. He wrote that “most of Syria’s cities are in reality new. Decades ago, they were large towns. Even Syria’s large and ancient cities—Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo—were pre-capitalist cities and had a limited energy to integrate [rural incomers]. They were unable to transform peasants into industrial workers.”

The Iraqi sociologist Ali al-Wardi applied the same idea to morals and values, seeing that rural Bedouins who moved to the cities of Iraq carried with them value systems that may have made sense in the deserts, but less so in the cities. Following the medieval writer Ibn Khaldoun, al-Wardi distinguished between the values of settled urban dwellers and nomadic Bedouins living in the desert. Each group, he said, developed a value system that suited life in their original environment, but as they moved to a new environment—as nomads settled into Iraq’s cities and towns in the modern era—they failed to adapt their value systems to the new environment. To take one example, he wrote, “values in Iraq still carry in their core some of the values of nomadic Bedouins in respecting the victor and scorning the defeated. But these values have been distorted as they left their original environment, and they lost their social function. They still guide behavior, like a psychological complex, without having an objective that is suitable for their new environment.”

The trends identified by Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Ali al-Wardi—rural Syrians moving to cities unable to provide them meaningful employment and the importation of nomadic values into urban Iraqi life—are both reflected by language. Where once a certain urban dialect dominated Baghdad, now a southern and Bedouin dialect has taken its place. The city has become rural, rather than the other way around. While I was interviewing Baghdadis for this piece, several people mentioned that southern dialects have become more common since the U.S. invasion of 2003, prompting a further shift in the language of Iraq’s capital city.

Almost everyone to whom I spoke could determine whether someone is Christian on the basis of his or her speech, even those who speak Neo-Aramaic at home. As Talal Kilano pointed out, his Baghdadi Christian dialect is often identified as Mosuli by Baghdadis themselves. The field is wide open for an intrepid linguist who wants to identify what exactly Baghdadi Christian Arabic is today and what distinguishes it from Mosuli Arabic and Muslim and Jewish Baghdadi Arabic, and even from the Baghdadi Christian Arabic before the city filled with Christians from further afield. The Arabic that Baghdadis from Mosuli descent speak today is not exactly Mosuli Arabic. One priest, who grew up in Baghdad to parents from Mosul, said he can tell by his or her accent someone who grew up in Mosul from someone who grew up in Baghdad with Mosuli parents. That matches with my experience in Baghdad; the Arabic I heard Mosuli Christians speaking was neither the Muslim dialect of Baghdad nor the very distinct dialect of Mosul, though it has much in common with the latter.

The Jewish Baghdadi dialect no longer exists in its native city, and the Christian dialect may be next. Not even all Christians have to leave Baghdad for their unique dialect to all but disappear. A few of the Christians of Baghdadi origin that I found were unaware that their forbears spoke a distinct dialect from their Muslim neighbors. As their numbers dwindle, this phenomenon can only increase, and even Christians who have preserved the Mosuli dialect will begin speaking just like the Muslims around them. This has always been the norm when dealing with Muslims, for both Christians and Jews. They switched to the dominant Muslim dialect of Baghdad in dealing with their Muslim neighbors and used their own only internally. But this is only sustainable if there is a critical mass of speakers that allow one to speak to enough Christians every day to maintain a unique and distinct dialect. Modern media pushes linguistic integration even faster, as children begin watching cartoons and hearing the television in the dominant dialect, similar to how in modern America children in suburban Atlanta now sound about the same as children in Seattle.

While waiting for an appointment in Baghdad, I entered a barber shop to pass some time. The barber, an ethnic Turkmen from Baghdad, said that the neighborhood around his shop on Palestine Street used to be filled with Christians. He had recently spoken with a Christian friend now living in Michigan, who said he wished he had stayed and been killed in Baghdad rather than wait out his years in a strange country. The barber hoped some of the Christians who had left would return, a sentiment I hear often from Baghdadis. When I mentioned this to a Christian couple I was talking to, they dismissed this as an empty platitude. They said that people say they want Christians to stay, but their actions reflect the opposite. Nonetheless, many Christians stay because it is their city, and has been for centuries. The younger generation of Baghdadi Christians may have lost the accent of their grandparents, but perhaps their linguistic integration marks the beginning of integration into a society that has shut out Christians for much of Islamic history in Iraq. For now, the weight of available evidence is against that hope.