Endangered Iranian Languages: Language Contact and Language Islands in Iran

Abstract

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.

Gilaki: From Language Regimes into Minoritizing

“…Iran, a country of many languages, has one standard language for schools, social interaction, and official business at the country level. Several languages spoken in Iran today are endangered, and unfortunately, there are no policies for them to be recorded, described, and ultimately, maintained (Gholami, 2020).…”