Shabo Talay helds a Ph.D in Semitic Philology, Assyriology and Islamic Studies from the Universtity of Heidelberg/Germany (1997). He is currently Associate Professor for Semitic Philology and Islamic Studies at Erlangen-Nuremberg University. He has many publications in various fields of Arabic and Aramaic dialectology. Recently he published a grammatical comparative description of all Aramaic dialects of the Khabur-Assyrians in Syria under the Title: “Die neuaramäischen Dialekte der Khabur-Assyrer”.