Personal indices in the verbal system of the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Zakho Ariel Gutman Independent researcher The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho is a highly endangered dialect of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic which was spoken by the Jews of Zakho (northern-Iraq) up to the 1950s, when virtually all of them lef Iraq for Israel. Thanks to documentation eforts which started in the ’40s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the interest of native speakers, we possess a rich textual documentation of this dialect today (Cohen, 2012; Y. Sabar, 2002; Avinery, 1988). These resources, together with recently conducted feldwork, are used in order to analyze the linguistic status of the verbal personal indices in this dialect, following the concepts presented by Bresnan & Mchombo (1987) as well as Corbett (2003). For each person marker, its status as a pronominal afx or as an agreement marker is established. The synchronic situation is compared with the known historic situation in older strata of Aramaic, such as Classical Syriac. The resulting analysis shows that the same apparent person marker may behave diferently in diferent syntactic environments. Another conclusion is that there is no clear-cut dichotomy between pronominal afxes and agreement markers, as transitional cases exist. Keywords: North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, endangered languages, Jewish languages, Zakho, Iraq, verbal system, agreement, pronominal afx, incorporated pronouns The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Zakho (=JZ) is a North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (a.k.a. NENA) dialect which was spoken in the city of Zakho (north-west Iraq, close to the Turkish border) up to the 1950s, when virtually all its speakers lef Iraq for Israel (for a historical overview, see the fascinating narrative of A. Sabar, 2009). In Israel the language has been under massive pressure from Hebrew and conse- quently, the language has hardly been transmitted to the younger generation. Though the dialect is now highly endangered, we possess rich textual corpora of this dialect, thanks to documentation eforts that started in the ’40s at the https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00004.gut The Mental Lexicon 14:2 (2019), pp. 189–208. issn 1871-1340 | e‑issn 1871-1375 © John Benjamins Publishing Company