TheAtlas of the Languages of Iran(ALI): A Research Overview

Abstract

The Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI): A Research Overview There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent initiatives which aims to fill this gap is the online Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (http://iranatlas.net). This article delineates objectives of the ALI research programme, atlas architecture, research methodology, and preliminary results that have been generated. Specific topics of interest are the structure and content of the linguistic data questionnaire; the handling of contrasting perspectives about the status of "languages" and "dialects" through a flexible multidimensional classification web; and the role of ongoing comparisons between language distribution assessments and hard linguistic data.

A perceptual dialectological approach to linguistic variation and spatial analysis of Kurdish varieties

“…In comparison with the traditional dialect map, the perceptual core area of the Sorani speech zone is also shifted to the northwest, towards the Iraqi-Turkish border. Like the new Atlas of the Languages of Iran (Anonby et al, 2016), but unlike the traditional dialect maps by Hassanpour (1992) and Haig & Öpengin (2014), some (27-52/171) of our participants extend the Sorani speaking area to the very south of Kordestan province in Iran. The perceptual Sorani speaking area, however, does not stretch anywhere near as far east as suggested by Hassanpour (1992) and Haig & Öpengin (2014), let alone southeast, as suggested by the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (Anonby et al, 2016).…”

“…Like the new Atlas of the Languages of Iran (Anonby et al, 2016), but unlike the traditional dialect maps by Hassanpour (1992) and Haig & Öpengin (2014), some (27-52/171) of our participants extend the Sorani speaking area to the very south of Kordestan province in Iran. The perceptual Sorani speaking area, however, does not stretch anywhere near as far east as suggested by Hassanpour (1992) and Haig & Öpengin (2014), let alone southeast, as suggested by the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (Anonby et al, 2016). These findings should therefore encourage traditional and perceptual dialectologists to look afresh at their results, as suggested by Montgomery & Stoeckle (2013).…”

“…The distinctly odd result emerging from the “draw-a-map” task is that the mental maps for Central and—to an even greater extent—Southern Kurdish of a considerable number of participants included an area roughly coinciding with the West Azerbaijan province in Iran. That is, up to 52/171 participants think that Sorani is spoken in northwest Iran, and more than 31/103 participants believe that Southern Kurdish varieties stretch far north into Iran and into an area in which—with the exception of Bijari—no southern variety of Kurdish is spoken (Anonby et al, 2016). Map 8 shows different spatial patterns of the Southern Kurdish varieties in Iran by respondents from Turkey, Iraq and Iran.…”

Bhāṣācitra: Visualising the dialect geography of South Asia

“…WALS (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). This format has been used to map data in South Asian languages (Arsenault, 2017;Liljegren et al, 2021) as well as the languages of Iran (Anonby et al, 2019(Anonby et al, , 2018. We develop this paradigm further to map areal language extents based on the location data in published linguistic fieldwork.…”

Dialectal Layers in West Iranian: a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Approach to Linguistic Relationships

“…Addi-tionally, this paper excluded East Iranian languages (including the languages Ormuri and Parachi), and shared patterns across both East and West Iranian should not be neglected; again, fulfilling this desideratum requires bigger data. At least two tacks can be taken for the purpose of data expansion: the first would involve digitizing of existing etymological dictionaries (Cheung 2007, Rastorgueva andĖdel'man 2003) and converting them into a computationally tractable data format; however, no complete Iranian etymological dictionary currently exists for all parts of the lexicon, though current efforts such as the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (Anonby et al 2019), in its pilot phase at the time of writing, work towards filling this gap. The second approach involves applying semi-supervised cognate detection methods (List 2012, Rama 2016 to digitized Iranian word lists, which can potentially be coupled with semi-supervised methodologies for linguistic reconstruction (Meloni et al 2019).…”