Mr. Din Lahdik is living in Sydney, Australia, since early 1970s. He started with talong private lessons to learn the Assyrian cuneiform and is working on a dictionary since several years. While visiting Sweden we invited him to our studio to talk about the Assyrian language and identity. He states that our language is not Aramean, but was called by that name by foreigners in order to destroy the Assyrian nation. The ancient nomadic people today known as Arameans never called themselves by such a name, he adds. The term Suryoyo linguistically means ”from Syria”. This means the name of the language should be ”Surayt” which is another form of Ashurayt, he says.

He suggests that a group of Assyrian scholars would try to make the contents of Assyrian clay tablets known to the public and pick up new words from there to enrich the spoken Surayt. In order to do so we need to transcribe the clay tablets to Latin letters, he says.