The study of the language of religious minorities in Iran is particularly important for understanding the historical development and typology of Iranian languages. Historical and linguistic evidence substantiates the idea that Zoroastrians and Jews in cities in central and western Iran preserved their former vernacular language, whereas the majority of the population replaced it with Persian in the New Iranian period. This paper focuses on the language of Jews in Hamadan and has two main objectives: first, it examines numerous distinctive features of Judeo-Hamadani; second, it reviews and updates recent research to clarify the language origins, using data from new materials recorded during fieldwork in Hamadan from October 2018 to August 2019, and in Yazd in 2017.
The topic of "Endangered Languages" has come more into the focus of public and academic debate in recent years and is being discussed by numerous scholars. The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which are in turn a branch of the Indo-European language family. As of 2008, there were an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers of Iranian languages. 1 The Ethnologue (2019) 2 estimates that there are eighty-six Iranian languages; the most prominent of these are Persian, Pashto, Balochi and the Kurdish group. Many languages spoken in Iran today will become extinct in the near future. A large number of these languages and dialects have never been recorded or described. Many of them are in danger of being lost if their speakers die or if members of younger generations turn to the use of other languages instead. In many areas of Iran, political, religious and social tensions are creating situations in which speakers abandon their languages and traditional ways of life. These speakers generally turn to the primary use of Persian, which is the country's dominant language and associated with social and economic power. The speed of this development has increased dramatically in the last century, especially in the case of minority languages. Language minorities in Iran are losing ground to dominant and more widely recognized Persian. The minority languages regularly lose their own characteristics, and their speakers are no longer able to communicate and fully understand the language. As a consequence, an endangered language gradually becomes dormant. The process of aging generations of speakers without language transmission to younger speakers ultimately leads to language shift and loss of language. Since language is closely related to culture, if a community loses its language, it also loses much of its cultural heritage and history, including the traditions of ceremonies, rituals, myths, poetry, songs, humor, habits, and rhetoric. These traditions and cultural habits are often replaced by the habits of the dominant community. A language can slowly become extinct, known as a "gradual death" or, alternatively, a "sudden death," when all or almost all of its speakers suddenly die or are killed, due to 1 Windfuhr, Iranian Languages, 1.
Zoroastrian Dari, also known as Behdini or Gavruni, is an endangered Iranian language spoken by the Zoroastrian minority who mostly live in Yazd and the surrounding areas as well as in Kerman and Tehran. Zoroastrian Dari is a unique Iranian language on account of its historical background and large number of subdialects. This language is only a spoken language and not a written one, but it seems that remnants of this language are attested in the Avestan manuscripts, particularly in the colophons. This paper provides a study of the existence of Zoroastrian Dari in the personal names in the colophons and Sālmargs of the Avestan manuscripts.
This paper* examines how Zoroastrians designate themselves (internal/self-designations), and how they are designated by others (external designations). Focusing on the term Gabr/Gavr as the external denotation for Zoroastrians and the term Gabrī/Gavrūnī as the designation for their language, it argues that these terms, once common in Western scholarship as well as among non-Zoroastrian Iranians, have become obsolete due to their pejorative undertones. However, they have recently been revived by some scholars, who justify such use with reference to the alleged etymology of Gabr as meaning “man” and by the fact that even some Zoroastrians use Gavr/Gavrūn and Gavrī/Gavrūnī as an internal designation for themselves and their language. This paper critically examines these views and argues that neither the etymology nor the internal self-designation justifies the use of these terms and proposes the term Zoroastrian Darī as the more appropriate designation of the language of the Zoroastrians of Iran.
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