Contribute to the Aramaic Archive

Record a speaker

First, please contact the documentation team and let us know the name of the dialect you want to help preserve. The easiest way to record is to film someone on your smartphone, capturing both sound and video. A few basic guidelines:

1. 1Hold your phone close to the speaker — ideally no more than one metre away — so the sound is clear.
2. 2Record in a quiet environment, away from background noise, music, or other conversations.
3. 3Begin each recording by asking the speaker to say their name, their family or father's name, the village or town their family comes from, and roughly when they were born.
4. 4Encourage them to talk: ask about memories of life in the old days — weddings, festivals, agriculture and the harvest, food (how yoghurt or cheese was made), and what the old houses were like.
5. 5Ask whether they know any traditional stories (tunyatha, qessetyatha, hukyatha). Many of these were once told through the winter months and are now being forgotten.

When your recordings are ready, contact the documentation team and we will arrange how to transfer the files. We then archive them and add them to the collection of recordings for each village and dialect.

Share manuscripts & research

We also welcome scanned manuscripts, transcriptions, lexical material, and linguistic studies. If you have texts or research you would like to see preserved and made citable, get in touch and we will discuss how to review and include them with full attribution.

Support with a donation

Preserving the many endangered dialects of Neo-Aramaic takes sustained financial support. If you would like to support the project with a donation, please contact us. Every contribution helps fund recording, digitization, and annotation work.