When Assyrian/Suryoyo is written using the Latin alphabet, we risk losing more than just words—we risk losing our history and identity. This is what Zekiye Cansu writes in her letter to the editor.
The Assyrian/Syriac language has survived wars, persecution, and generations of migration. But today it faces a new threat—not from outside, but from within our own diaspora.
The Assyrian language is one of the world’s oldest living languages. For thousands of years, our alphabet has carried our history, our faith, our literature, and our identity from generation to generation.
Our ancestors preserved the language through war, persecution, genocide, and migration. Despite all this, both the language and the written form survived.
That is why it pains me to see how we today, from the safety of the diaspora, risk undermining our own alphabet.
An increasing number of people are choosing to write and teach Assyrian using the Latin alphabet instead of our own written language. It is particularly concerning that this trend is sometimes driven by people who are themselves proficient in the alphabet—individuals in education, research, and the institutions that will shape the future of the language.
How can one talk about preserving a language while gradually replacing its alphabet?
Certainly, the Latin alphabet may seem easier to young people growing up in Europe. But a language is more than just pronunciation and communication. The alphabet is part of a people’s soul. It is the key to our history, our religious texts, our books, and our collective memory.
The Assyrian alphabet is not just a collection of ancient symbols. It is a living link to a civilization that dates back thousands of years—one of the Middle East’s oldest written languages. Our religious texts, poems, and historical documents have been written using this alphabet for centuries.
When we replace it with Latin letters, we don’t just lose the script—we lose a part of our identity.
We would never accept it if Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, or Jews abandoned their alphabets and wrote their languages exclusively using the Latin alphabet. Why, then, should we accept it for our own language?
If the next generation learns the language exclusively through the Latin alphabet, we risk creating generations who cannot read church texts, ancient manuscripts, or traditional books in their original form. They may be able to speak the language, but they will lose touch with their historical heritage.
It is particularly troubling when this trend is driven by educated individuals and language experts—the very people who should be the first to defend and strengthen the alphabet. What appears to be a practical solution today may turn out to be a cultural loss tomorrow.
The diaspora should be the place where we preserve our language and our alphabet—not the place where they are gradually being replaced.
Preserving the alphabet is not about nostalgia or resistance to modernity. It is about respect for our history and responsibility toward future generations.
We need more courses, more schools, and more cultural initiatives that teach children and young people to read and write the Assyrian alphabet. We need to take pride in our heritage—not simplifications that are slowly erasing our identity.
A people who forget their alphabet slowly begin to forget themselves.
Our language has survived for thousands of years. The question is not whether it can survive—but whether we choose to let it.