Essays on Typology of Iranian Languages

Alireza Korangy, Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, Alireza Korangy, Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110601749
• eBook ISBN: 9783110602104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Littérature du Moyen-Orient

The Iranian languages are one of the world's major language families. With an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers, these languages constitute the western group of the larger Indo-Iranian family, which represents a major eastern branch of the Indo-European languages. Geographically, the Iranian Languages are spoken from Central Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the West to Pakistan and western edged of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China in the east. Iranian languages have long been among the major interests of the philologists and general linguists, and European scholars have made tremendous contributions to the study of this language family. In light of such efforts, now we know that the Iranian languages can be historically divided into three phases, that are old, middle and new Iranian languages, and the new Iranian languages may be generally grouped as Eastern and Western. In recent years, the orientation towards typology has led to the appearance of somewhat more ponderance on the subject but the work has not included description of some of the very important languages of the Caspian, and or of the religious minorities (such as those of the Zoroastrians or the Jewish community), of the four-fold Central Plateau dial.

Loss vs. expansion of gender in Tatic languages: Kafteji (Kabatei) and Kelāsi

Donald Stilo

Note: I wish to express my gratitude to the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, for its one-year invitation to join them as a fellow and for its generous support in the writing of the first draft of this chapter. I also would like to express my thanks to Geoff Haig for his feedback and comments on this chapter.

1 Introduction

In this chapter, I document a case in which two neighboring, closely related dialects, even though mostly mutually intelligible and in regular socioeconomic contact and interdependence, can still diverge from each other in striking ways. While areal phenomena and contact are important in such situations leading to convergence, divergence may also be taking place at the same time due to reasons internal to the specific dialects as well as to external factors that cause them to drift apart, e.g., areal phenomena with different isoglottic patternings encompassing one dialect but not the other; the retention of archaic features in one of these dialects as a factor of a more peripheral location; sociolinguistic attitudes; intermarriage patterns; and language shift, to name a few.

Below I will present an extreme and somewhat unique case of just such divergence on one issue: gender marking. Kafteji and Kelāsi¹ are two neighboring Tatic² dialects of the Central Tati group (Stilo 1981) that have taken the original two-term masculine/feminine gender distinction of Tatic languages – still quite robust in many members of the group but totally lost to about 40% of the Tati languages and all Talyshi and Tatoid dialects – and have each pushed the pattern in completely opposite extremes. That is, Kafteji has expanded the marking of gender beyond the grammatical domains where gender agreement is usually encoded in thes...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Iranian languages and linguistic typology
• Ergativity in New West Iranian
• Aspect in Iranian two systems: Persian and Pashto
• Loss vs. expansion of gender in Tatic languages: Kafteji (Kabatei) and Kelāsi
• Mazandarani: A typological survey
• Referential Null Subjects (RNS) in colloquial spoken Persian: Does speaker familiarity have an impact?
• A typological study of (in)definiteness in the Iranian languages
• The quotative marker in Gilaki
• Plural marking in the New West Iranian languages and dialects: a historical and typological approach
• A typological sketch of the Jewish Iranian dialects
• Epilogue
• Index