Iranian Minority Languages

International audienceThis collection of articles is based on a selection of papers presented at a panel entitled “Iranian minority languages” which was held at the 30th German Congress of Orientalists at Freiburg i.Br. University in September 2007. For the present collection, the selected papers have been substantially enlarged and/or revised. Also included is an article whose authors could not attend the 2007 panel.The title “Iranian minority languages” is here interpreted rather broadly to refer to Iranian minority languages and dialects spoken in Iran today, and to Iranian varieties which are, or were, spoken in other countries. (The term “Iranian varieties” will occasionally be used in this collection to include the notions of “language” and “dialect”.) In spite of the geographical distance between the languages encompassed by this term – reaching from Iraqi Kurdistan, Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus via Iran and Afghanistan to the Pamir – most of them share a number of features. For instance,the absence of a standard language and/or orthography has important consequences for those who try to use the language for writing, teaching, etc. The investigation of the history of Iranian languages has shown that the influence of interregional or national languages is by no means limited to modern times. However, the speed and pervasiveness of such influence has markedly increased by their predominant or even exclusive use in schools and the media, and has reached more or less all speakers of Iranian languages today. Television is a crucial element in this process, as it disseminates the knowledge of national languages in their standard, rather than their local form, as e.g. in the case of Persian, where – by way of Iranian TV broadcasts – Tehrani Farsi has replaced Dari as an influential language in Afghanistan, and local varieties of Persian within Iran.Some Iranian varieties (among them Pamir languages as well as as various minority languages and dialects in Iran) qualify for the category of endangered languages in its narrow definition, as they are spoken by only a very small number of people today. However, many other Iranian languages and dialects such as Mazenderani, Balochi, or Sistani may be labelled “medium endangered”; while the number of their speakers is not yet particularly low at present, it seems questionable whether children will continue to use them – and if they do not, these languages could quitewell be lost in one or two generations. This makes it specifically important to collect data from minority languages and dialects, many of which are still imperfectly known, and to investigate them. The description of their grammatical structures is also important for both typological purposes, as Iranian varieties show many interesting features, and for the historical perspective, as the data of today may shed light on those points in the history of Iranian that are not reflected in the documents that have come down to us. Conversely, surviving texts from older stages and from extinct Iranian languages offerprecious material for comparison, often helping to explain parallel patterns of contemporary languages