Iranian Linguistics

Together with a group of faculty and students in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, we investigate various aspects of Iranian languages. This investigation consists of both descriptive as well as theoretical analyses. The Iranian Linguistics Research team began its work in 2015, supported by an NSF funded grant, and has continued its activities since then. We received an NSF grant for a workshop on Complex Predicates in Iranian Languages in 2019, and a major NSF grant to investigate the syntax, morphology and phonology of five Iranian languages (Balochi, Ossetian, Pashto, Persian, Sorani-Kurdish) in 2019.

The research team has produced:

  • Several thousands of hours of linguistic elicitation
  • Database consisting of the original interviews conducted on 18 Iranian languages and the transcriptions of the data that are being uploaded to the UA Repository, a university-managed, password-protected data-storage. Public access to the data will be provided when the transfer of data is completed.
  • A webpage for the Iranian Linguistics Research Team
  • Wikipedia style pages for seven Iranian languages (Baluchi, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Ossetian, Pashto, Sorani, Kurmanji, and Persian) have been created. These pages, consisting of descriptions of cultural and linguistic specifications of these languages, are being uploaded to the webpage of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, home of the Department of Linguistics. They are now accessible to the public.
  • Several invited presentations as well as conference talks and posters
  • A lecture series called Lectures on Iranian Linguistics in Arizona (LILA). This lecture series features a monthly presentation delivered by experts in various areas of Iranian Linguistics from different universities around the globe.

The research team is currently working on transcribing and analyzing the collected data of five Iranian languages, and is preparing several articles to be presented at conferences and submitted to journals.

The Iranian Language Family

The oldest attested languages in the Iranian family are Old Persian, known from the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenian emperors, and Avestan, the language of Avesta, a collection of sacred Zoroastrian texts. Old Persian can be clearly associated with the Southwest Iranian group, and must be considered a direct precursor of Middle and Modern Persian (Payne 1990). The three major variants of Persian are: Farsi (Iran), Tajiki (Tajikistan), and Dari (Afghanistan). Lori is another member of the Southwest Iranian family spoken in Loristan and Ilam, two provinces in Western Iran.

There are several languages or language sub-groups within the Northwestern Iranian languages, including several dialects of Kurdish: Kurmanji, spoken in the northern part of Kurdistan province in Iran, and in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; Gorani, spoken in the southern part of Kurdistan; Sorani, in the Kurdish areas across the border of Iran and Iraq; and Hawrami in the western part of Iran. The other members of the Northwestern group are Laki, in the western part of Iran; Zazaki (or Dimli) in Anatolia (Turkey); Baluchi, in Eastern Iran and Pakistan; Taleshi, along the Caspian See in Iran; Mazandarani, near the Caspian Sea; and Vafsi, in the central areas in Iran, as well as Gorani and Hawrami in the western borders of Iran.

The Southeast Iranian languages include Pashto, spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Pamiri in Central Asia. Finally, the Northeast language is Ossetian, spoken in Russia and Georgia.

All Iranian languages exhibit some common characteristics. One such property is that they are all verb-final. Other common properties include (a) the remarkably interesting and complex verbal constructions, (b) the existence of a broad range of derivational and inflectional affixes, (c) a syntax-morphological phenomenon called EZAFE (addition) construction where an EZAFE enclitic links a nominal element to its modifiers and possessor, and (d) various types of clitic positioning.

There are also some differences between these languages. For example, some of these languages have nominative/accusative properties (Persian), while almost all others have retained split-ergativity in transitive constructions based on tense or aspect. Furthermore, while Persian passive construction seems to be overwhelmingly based on light verb alternation (Folli, Harley, Karimi 2005), other Iranian languages exhibit mixed constructions consisting of both morphological and structural patterns. Moreover, another difference between these languages is object marking. While some of them, e.g. Persian, mark specific objects, known as Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Karimi 1990, 1996, Karimi & Smith 2018, Ghomeshi 1997, Jasbi 2018, among others), others lack this property. Additionally, elliptical constructions receive various acceptability levels in these languages. Finally, the phonologies and prosodies of these languages vary widely.