The so-called Central Plateau Dialects or simply Central Dialects belong to the South Median group of Northwest Iranian languages and are spoken in central Iran, where the prevailing language is Persian. Currently, vestiges of these dialects are limited to several dozen remote villages as well as to the older generation of the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities living in the cities and in diaspora. The dominant influence of Persian for more than a millennium has resulted in the ousting of the vernaculars not only in major towns but also in a majority of villages. Historical evidence suggests that Central Dialects were native to the entire central Iranian Plateau, larger towns included, until the late medieval period. The big shift may have taken place during and after the Safavid dynastic rule, perhaps as a result of forceful propagation of Shi'ism, among other economic and socio-political vicissitudes of those days. Concrete evidence becomes available only in the later nineteenth century when European travelers and local geographers began to report on the language situation of the area. These documents enable us to speculate on the patterns and rates of language shift in various regions speaking Central Dialects. This trend has been accelerating parallel with the enormous socio-economic changes in the last half century. In many villages the local dialect is moribund and becoming increasingly limited to the elders, and the extinction will be the inevitable result of the forces of modernization and globalization in general and the rapid expansion of Persian education and mass media in particular. This paper attempts to show the dynamics of language shift among Central Dialects. The possible causes of the shift within village communities is discussed, while the urban Jewish and Zoroastrian speakers receive individual attention. Part of the data comes from the author's own fieldwork.
The texts published here are in an eastern Mazandarani dialect spoken in the Caspian littoral in northern Iran. The informant is a rural woman who recollects the supernatural deeds of her father-in-law, revered like a saint after his death. The stories are narrated in a most intimate manner, something rarely published previously in Iranian dialect documentations. The folkloric songs typify those sung in Caspian rice paddies by women, who traditionally have a dominant role in the rural economy. The stories and songs provide both linguistic and ethnographic data for this poorly studied but important province with its unique culture among the Iranian-speaking groups in Iran.
By the turn of the second to first millennium BCE, the Iranian-speaking tribes of the Steppe Bronze Cultures had parted into two main groups: those who migrated south eventually into the plateau which bears their name to this date, and those who expanded their domain within the steppes, westward into the Volga and Pontic regions and beyond, and southward well into the Caucasus and Cen tral Asia. These two main branches of the same people evolved in the very different ways, characteristic to other societies living in the southern and northern Eurasia.Nevertheless, as South and North Iranians -even if separated by deserts and mountains -were often immediate neighbors, they kept influencing each other as long as the Iranian pastoralist riders ruled the Eurasian Steppes. After all, many of the vicissitudes undergone by Persia since the dawn of her history have been related to the Steppe warriors, and, on the other side of the coin, much of what we know today about the history of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans are due to their interactions with the Iranian civilization in Western Asia.In addition to these two groups, which I shall call South and North Iranians for simplicity, we may yet identify a third group: those of Central Asia, whom are usually referred to as Eastern Iranians in scholarly literature. These consist of the settled Chorasmians, Sogdians, and Bactrians, among others, who were the immediate southern neighbors of the nomadic Sacae, Massagetae, Dahae, and Chionites of the area from the river Jaxartes up to the Kazakh Steppe. The proximity to the plains of Central Asia made the region a frequent prey to nomadic invasions, and kingdoms were made and unmade as a result. T a b l e 1. approximate chronology of the rulers of Iranian-speaking lands Centuries Western Steppes Iranian Plateau Central Asia 8-6 Bce Cimmerians? Medes Massagetae 6-3 Bce Scythians Achaemenids Sakas 3 bce-3 Ce Sarmatians Arsacids Sakas 3-7 Ce Alans Sasanians Chionites, Hephthalites, Turks
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