Median Succumbs to Persian after Three Millennia of Coexistence: Language Shift in the Central Iranian Plateau

Abstract

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 Dialect of Jowshaqan Part One: Phonology, Morphology and Syntax

“…Similar construction is found in the Central Dialects of Isfahan area, e.g., Jarquyi sart tel dez r hessu "the ladder is by the wall" (seeBorjian 2008b).…”

“…These sources generally show agreement, except for a few traits that will be mentioned in due cases. Moreover, Lambton's data has the advantage of being over seventy years old, collected when the dia-lect was not yet as much flooded by Persian as it has been since the spread of mass media and education in the last half a century (see Borjian 2009b).…”

“…Having found the texts published by Lambton too complicated to use, I began developing a transcription of my own. Before long I realised that I would need a reader-friendly transcription and an exact translation of the entire corpus for an accurate grammar of the dialect to be compiled (see Borjian 2009a).…”

“…As it is inferred from the table, the status of va-is not very clear due to lack of sufficient data. However, comparisons with related dialects (see Stilo 2008a;Borjian 2008b) suggest that va-should belong to the Type II, or the "strong" type, for it behaves more like an independent component than a preverb. In this sense bar-is even stronger than dar-, because the former, which is also an adverb meaning "out" (ba o bar ~ bar-ba o "he went out"), always adds one and the same meaning to the verb.…”

“…2 For the position of Jowshaqani among the Central Dialects, seeKrahnke 1976;Lecoq 1989;Windfuhr 1992;Stilo 2008b;Borjian 2008a. …”