This paper will report on a project that I am currently undertaking on the language of a corpus of Modern Assyrian folktales. These folktales have been transmitted orally for many generations in numerous Modern Assyrian communities. The traditions are gradually being forgotten and are not being passed down to the younger generations. For this reason there is an urgent need to record them. Over the last five years, I have undertaken fieldwork in numerous diaspora Modern Assyrian communities, in Western Europe, North America, Australia and the Caucasus. Until the first half of the twentieth century the vast majority of the Modern Assyrians dwelt in rural communities in villages throughout South Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq and Western Iran. In these villages the folktales were generally told by a small number of story-tellers. In many cases there was only one story-teller in a village or group of villages, which has made the traditions more vulnerable to loss. Since the communities were for the most part illiterate, the orally transmitted folklore, such as the folktales, played an important role in preserving cultural traditions. The language of the folktales exhibits various distinctive linguistic features that are used to enhance the dramatic presentation of the events in the stories. Some of these features distinguish their language from that of everyday conversation. This endows the tales with a status of legends, separated from the realities of daily life, which is likely to have been a factor that helped strengthen the conservativeness of their transmission. The linguistic features distinctive of the folktales include special narrative verbal forms and a range of devices for marking episodic boundaries and narrative high points. One of the central linguistic features of the narratives is past verbal form that has an evidential function of presenting the events as reported tradition rather than reality observed by the speaker. The paper will give examples of these linguistic features.