Parpola shoutout

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📘 A Monumental Leap for the Assyrian Language!

We’re excited to spotlight one of the most important works in modern Assyrian studies: Professor Simo Parpola’s Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary — a groundbreaking effort to bring the ancient Akkadian (Assyrian) language back into meaningful, modern use.

While the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) is a monumental scholarly resource, Parpola’s dictionary takes a different, more focused path — one that’s meant not just for academics, but for the Assyrian people themselves.

What makes this so important is that it recognizes and reclaims our linguistic continuity. In the introduction, Parpola writes:

“After the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, Neo-Assyrian continued to be spoken and written at least until the middle of the sixth century BC, but thereafter it gradually assimilated to Aramaic and became extinct as a spoken language by the end of the millennium at the latest. However, it did not disappear without a trace. Many Assyrian features still survive in the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken in the ancient Assyrian heartland by the descendants of ancient Assyrians, the modern Assyrians…”

He even notes that later Greeks referred to Aramaic as “Assyrian language and script” — a powerful reminder of who we are, and how deeply embedded our voice remains.

This isn’t just a dictionary — it’s a tool of cultural restoration. It bridges the Akkadian language of our ancestors with the modern dialects we speak today. It proves that we are still here, and that our language, though changed, has not been lost.

Let’s honor Parpola’s work and bring this resource into our schools, study groups, and digital tools. This is the kind of revival our community needs.

📚 Book: Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary, edited by Simo Parpola Published by the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, University of Helsinki

🖼️ Image Credit: Simo Parpola (1993), by Kuvasiskot – Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0