Written by Afsheen Sharifzadeh, a graduate of Tufts University focusing on Iran and the Caucasus. The present article aims to familiarize with the reader with the past and present of Iranian Azerbaijan, the Iranian “Old Azari” and Turkic Azeri languages. Salient features of modern Azerbaijani Turkic are outlined herein, particularly vis-à-vis Anatolian Turkish.

The Persian “Blue Mosque” in Yerevan, Armenia (c. 1765 A.D.), a unique example of Persian mosque architecture, was commissioned by the Afshārid scion Husayn ‘ali Khān, the Khan of Erivan (خانات ايروان Xānāt-e Iravān; Երևանի խանություն Yerevani khanut’yun) when the local Shia population consisted of a Persian elite and a Turkic semi-nomadic military class. The outer shell of the cupola is decorated with a field of turquoise-glazed bricks and various bands of colorful geometric patterns, above which lie eight uniform medallions resembling the head of a predatory feline.

Background
Azerbaijani is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic family, and thus shares that clade with modern Turkish, Turkmen, Gagauz, Qashqai, Salar, Khorasani Turkic and Khorezmian Uzbek. It was brought to its present homeland by a broad wave of invaders from Central Asia who “flooded Khorāsān” and thence Iran and Anatolia when “Tūrān defeated Ērān” in the 11th century A.D. The aftermath of the Turko-Mongol incursion resulted in the birth of the Great Seljuk Empire (آل سلجوق Āl-e Saljūq; c. 1037-1194 A.D.)‎, founded by a dynasty of Oghuz Turkic provenance that became sedentarized and adopted Persian language, culture, and tradition, and later exported this Turko-Persian culture to Anatolia.

EPSON scanner image

(A) Painting of the iconic Persian “Blue Mosque” of Tabriz (مسجد كبود masjed-e kabūd) in ruins, by a French tourist, Jules Laurens, c. 1872; (B, C&D) The current state of the Blue Mosque with remnants of its elegant cobalt blue Persian tilework. The structure was commissioned by Jahān Shāh, the ruler of the Kara Qoyunlū in 1465 A.D. It was severely damaged in an earthquake in 1780 A.D., with moderate but incomplete restoration efforts beginning in the 1970s.

Much as in the case of Khwarezm, a minority Turkophone military class emerged over the course of centuries in the context of a sizeable Iranian peasantry within the ancient Iranian Zoroastrian province of Ātṛpātakāna (from the Old Persian name Ātṛpat, “protected by fire”; an Achaemenid satrap who founded the independent kingdom of his namesake + suffix –akāna; whence MP ܐܕܪܒܐܕܓܐܢ Ādurbādgān → NP آذربايجان Āðarbāyjān “Land of the Holy Fire”). In the centuries thereafter, the autochthonous Iranian idiom of Azerbaijan, the so-called “Old Azari” language, faced a gradual decline. Under this new dynamic, militaristic Oghuz clans in Azerbaijan rose to the highest echelons of regional power following the collapse of the Mongol Ilkhanid state (ایلخانان‎ Ilxānān; Hu’legiīn Ulus) with the rise of the Kara Qoyunlū and Āq Qoyunlū Turkmen at the end of the 14th century A.D. It was only in this period that Old Azari began to lose ground at a faster pace than previous centuries, however it was definitively supplanted by Turkic no earlier than the Safavid period (دودمان صفوى Dūdmān-e Ṣafavī; c. 1501-1722 A.D.). Turkophones did, however, adopt the former Iranian people’s endonym, آذرى Āðarī. Later the Turkophone Azeri nucleus gave rise to the Safavid (originally an Iranian-speaking clan that became Turkified and adopted Turkish as their vernacular under the Āq Qoyunlū, as evidenced by the Old Azari-language quatrains of Shaikh Ṣafī-al-dīn, their eponymous ancestor, and by his biography), Afshārid and Qājār dynasties, although their courts remained discriminantly Persian in their official language and culture.

(left) Shaikh Ṣafī ad-Dīn Isḥāq Ardebīlī (1252-1334; شيخ صفى الدين اسحاق اردبيلى ); the eponymous ancestors of the Safavid Dynasty, composed important verses in Classical Persian and the contemporaneous Tāti language Ardebīl, a dialect of the Iranian “Old Azari” language. His descendants, backed by powerful regional soldiery of Turkic stock, later adopted Turkic as their vernacular. He is interred in an elaborate tomb complex in Ardebīl (right). 

On the Old Azari Language and the recent Turkification of Azerbaijan
The “Old Azari” language–previously one of the major Iranian languages–comprised a sprachbund of dialects distributed in a broad range between lake Urmia in the west and the Caspian littoral in the east. Old Azari seems to have shared a genetic affinity with the ancestor of the modern Talysh language, and it further appears to form a broader group with the so-called “Northwestern” branch of Iranian including modern Gilaki, Māzanderāni, Semnāni, and Zaza-Gorani. Some linguists hold that the southern Tāti varieties of Iranian Azerbaijan around Tākestān, as well as those of Harzand and Karangān, among other modern dialects sprinkled throughout Northwestern Iran, are peripheral remnants of Old Azari. As such, this language has been spoken in the region of Azerbaijan for at least three millennia.

The modern distribution of Tāti language and its close relative, Talysh (Tāleshi), in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan. These two languages likely represent the last exponents of a variety of the ancient Median language, which has been used in Azerbaijan for nearly three millennia. 

As the available compendia which first make mention of the idiom appear only in the centuries following the Islamic conquest of Azerbaijan, the Old Iranian stage of the language remains unknown. However on the basis of shared sound changes and the absence of evidence for a significant population dislocation event, Yarshater posits that Old Azari [and its daughters in Tāti] must inevitably be descendants of the ancient Median language (note: despite recently-popularized folk belief, the “Kurdish” languages are demonstrably not so. They instead appear to be part of a group with Central and Southwest Iranian dialects, layered over a Northwestern Iranian substratum following their migration into the territory of ancient Media).

The first sources which make mention of the language date to the early Islamic period (Ibn al-Moqaffa, 759 A.D.), and suggest the language of Azerbaijan, Fahlawī (الفهلوية al-fahlawīya), formed a group with the vernaculars of Ray, Hamadān, and Isfahān. Later an anecdote concerning Abū Zakarīyā Kāteb Tabrīzī and his teacher Abu’l-ʿAlāʾ Maʿarrī refers again to the vernacular of Azerbaijan in the 12th century A.D. While Kāteb Tabrīzī was in Maʿarrat al-Noʿmān in Syria, he met a fellow-countryman and conversed with him in a language which Abu’l-ʿAlāʾ could not understand. When Abu’l-ʿAlāʾ asked him to identify the language, Kāteb told him it was “the language of the people of Azerbaijan.” The statement of Yāqūt in the 13th century in his Moʿjam al-boldān to the effect that “The people of Azerbaijan have a language which they call al-āḏarīya (الآذرية), and it is intelligible only to themselves” makes it clear that Old Azari was still current in Azerbaijan on the eve of the Mongol invasion.

Remains of the Mausoleum of the Mongol ruler Il-khan Öljeitü, at Soltāniyeh, Zanjān province, Iran. In addition to its renown for carving and ornamentation, it is one of the largest brick domes in the world, just at the theoretical engineering limit for a brick dome and the third largest dome in the world after the domes of Florence Cathedral and Hagia Sophia. This structure was iconic in the repertoire of Persian architecture, and later inspired the Persian-style Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi and the Taj Mahal at Agra.

It is important to note that Old Azari retained its currency as the dominant vernacular of Azerbaijan for several centuries following the initial Turkic migration into the region in the 11th century A.D. Writing in the 14th century, Abaqa Ḥamdallāh Mostawfī attests to the enduring Iranian character of Azerbaijan’s urban centers, stating that Marāḡa and Zanjān spoke “modified” and “pure Pahlavi”, respectively (پهلوى مغير pahlavī-e moḡayyar and پهلوى راست pahlavī-e rāst; an undoubtedly imprecise reference to the Iranic Azari language in contrast to Turkic). It appears that Ardebīl’s language was previously one of the more important dialects of Old Azari, with Shaikh Ṣafī-al-dīn, the eponymous ancestor of the Safavid dynasty, composing dozens of dobaytīs (distichs) in its language. According to the account of Jean During, a contemporary French traveler, the inhabitants of Tabriz did not speak Turkish in the 15th century.

It appears Old Azari only lost its status as the majority language between the 16th-17th centuries with the ascent of the Qizilbash-backed Safavids. The subsequent influx of numerous Turkic military elements into the region further spread Turkic at the detriment of Old Azari, which in turn receded and ceased to be used, at least in the major urban centers. Notwithstanding the city of Tabriz maintained a number of distinctly Old Azari-speaking neighborhoods well into the Safavid period with the poet Ruhi Anārjānī composing a compendium of the language as late as the 17th century. However by the turn of the 20th century the Turkification of Azerbaijan was near completion, with the old Iranic speakers found exclusively in remote recesses of the mountains or other isolated areas such as Harzand village in Marand. Lamentably, language shift is currently in progress and the remaining Tāti dialects face a state of attrition and imminent endangerment.

Azerbaijani Turkish in the 21st Century
Today, Azerbaijani is a pluricentric language and exhibits a primary division in dialect: North [or Soviet] Azeri vs. South [or Iranian] Azeri. Prior to the political events which gave rise to the current dicentrism, the language was written exclusively in the Perso-Arabic script. Following the Treaty of Gulistan and therein imperial Russia’s acquisition of modern-day Azerbaijan from Qajar Iran, the northern variety became subject to widespread Russian influence and later a series of orthographic reforms under the Soviet regime. With the fall of the U.S.S.R., the new Republic of Azerbaijan adopted a modified Latin script in 1991. On the other hand, Iranian Azeri (self designated آذرى ديلى Azeri dili or ترک ديلى türk dili; Persian: تركى tōrkī), whose dialects compose roughly 15 million speakers or the majority of the Azeri-speaking community, persisted independently from its congener under the strong influence of Persian and, as in the past, is written in a modified Perso-Arabic script. Without any official status, Southern Azeri lacks a standardized form but relies strongly on the Northern variety for official media and broadcast.

The modern distribution of the Oghuz branch of Turkic (not depicted: Khorasani Turkic, Salar, Xorezmian Uzbek). Azerbaijani is genetically closest to Khorasani Turkic and Qashqai, although the northern variety has been strongly influenced by Turkish.

The Northern and Southern varieties of Azerbaijani are moderately mutually intelligible without training. Since, for several decades, there has been little, if any, cultural exchange between the two parts of Azerbaijan, the mutual intelligibility is decreasing. Today the two languages are remarkably distinct in phonology, morphology, syntax, and source of loanwords; purist efforts upon the Northern variety have uprooted numerous Persianisms in favor of Russianisms and revisionist Turkic models, while the Southern variety continues to rely upon Persian much as it has since its arrival to the region. By comparison, Anatolian Turkish has instead drawn from French and English.

Southern Azeri dialects in Iran are varied, but all are mutually intelligible. The traditional centers of the language are Tabriz, Urmia, Ardebil, and Zanjān. In these areas, Azerbaijani is the language of the domestic, public and cultural spheres, while Persian enjoys superiority as it remains the language of education, literature, media and administration. Tehran has emerged in recent years as a new hub for the Iranian Azeri population, where the Azeri language is heard profusely throughout the city. It would seem that the Assyrian and Armenian Christian communities of Azerbaijan are functionally trilingual in their own language, Persian and at least passively Azerbaijani. Note a dialect of South Azeri is also spoken in the province of Kirkuk, Iraq. 

Phonology
Southern Azeri vernacular is markedly distinct from its Soviet congener in phonology. The formal register of the language used in limited news and broadcast media relies on Standard [Northern] Azerbaijani phonology, however the vernacular language exhibits a number of eccentric features detailed here.

Non-initial syllables have vowel harmony, as in Turkish; many dialects, however, show signs of a dissolution of the vowel harmony (e.g., gəl-max– “to come” instead of gəl-mək). This process–carried to completion in medieval Chaghatay and its modern descendant, Uzbek–is the result of influence from Persian.

Among the most distinguishing phonetic qualities of South Azeri–noted even among non-Turkic speakers in Iran–is a sound change whereby post-alveolar affricates /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ are realized as alveolar affricates [t͡s] and [d͡z], respectively. This phenomenon is encountered in the areas around Tabriz and to the west, south and southwest of Tabriz (including Kirkuk in Iraq): čox → tsox “a lot; very” (cf. Turkish çok); čörəh → tsörəh “bread” (Turkish: çörek); Azərbaijan → azərbaidzan “Azerbaijan”; olajax → oladzax “S/he/it will be, become.”

There is a strong tendency towards palatalization of velars, /k/ and /g/ to /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/, respectively: geddax → jeddax “Let’s go” (cf. Turkish gittik lit. “we left”); xošum gəlmir → xošum jəlmir lit. “It doesn’t please me”; ikiminji → ičiminji “second (ordinal number)”; güneš kimi – jünəš čimi “like the Sun”.

Final -l is palatalized to -r in many dialects: e.g. deyir/dəyir(di) “is not” (cf. Turkish değil): yeməğimiz amade dəyir “Our food is not ready”. 

There is an aversion to final -k in native vocabulary following light vowels (e/æ, ü, i) in many dialects, which has become -h, including in compounds and infinitives: e.g. ürəh (Turkish: yürek “heart”); jərəh (cf. gerek “needed, necessary”), böyüh (büyük “big”), jələjəhdə (Turkish: gelecekte “in the future”), evlənməh (evlenmek “to be married”). However, –k (and palatalization → č) is preserved in verbal constructions and loanwords: mübarək olsun deyək “let’s say congratulations.”

The -ir- indicating the continuous aspect of the verb in the 1st person conjugation is often elided to -iy- in colloquy: istiyəm ” I want” (cf. istirəm).

Another idiosyncratic feature of South Azeri is in its prosody- which generally mirrors that of vernacular Persian, but is distinguished in interrogative clauses by a flat high-tone penultimate syllable followed by an elongated, rising tone final syllable: doğrudan belə dí? “Is it really so?”

Syntax 

The impact of Iranian on Azeri syntax is particularly clear in the structure of complex sentences, especially in the sociolects of the educated. Note that most of the features concerned occurred more frequently in Ottoman Turkish but have been given up in modern Standard Turkish; some subsist as substandard varieties. 

In vernacular speech, particularly among the educated, imitations of Indo-European language-type subordinative constructions (from Persian) are used instead of Turkic, left-branching, constructions, in which the subordinated elements are more or less expanded sentence constituents:

Like the Iranian subjunctive, the optative is often used as a sort of subordinative mood. It is formed by adding -a(m/n/x) to the stem of the verb, which mirrors the pattern in vernacular Persian:

As in Ottoman Turkish and Chaghatay, Persian subordinative conjunctions, alien to Turkic sentence structure, are widely used, particularly ke (often palatalized to če), which appears as a connective device between sentences of different kinds, e.g

Morphology
The Turkic noun-forming suffix –lik, -lıq is parallel to Perisan -i, -gi has been used to create from lexemes adopted from Persian: širinlik “sweetness”; həmišəlik “eternity”; əzadarlıq “misery, melancholy”. The Turkic particle –li “of, from” is used in placed of Persian constructions with bâ– or -mand “with”: ərzišli “valuable” (cf. با ارزش bâ arzeš lit. “with value”), 

The formal register of Southern Azeri makes use of the comparative case form daha, while the dialects have –rax (cf. Uzbek -roq) and -tər (from Persian): daha böyük; böyühtər “bigger”; daha tsox; tsoxtär “more.” The superlative case form ən is sometimes substituted wholesale from Persian: behtərin vs. ən yaxšı “best”.

South Azeri makes extensive use of -(ıy)nan/(iy)næn “with; by” in place of Northern -(ıy)la/(iy)le: mənnən (mənimle) ; gardašlarıynan (qardašlarla) “with friends”, birbiriynən (bi-biri ila) “with each other”

The Persian measure words تا- -tâ and -دانه -dâne have been assimilated into one: –dənə, e.g. iki dənə gözəl evlər “two beautiful houses” (cf. Persian: دوتا خانه زيبا do tâ xâne-ye zibâ).

Oghuz Turkic does not have an equivalent of the standalone verb “to be able to”, and instead utilizes a construction with a conjugated personal suffix from the verb -bilmek “to know”. In contrast, South Azeri vernacular uses an innovative standalone verb eliyəbilmax (cf. Turkish edebilmek “to be able to do”) followed by the optative, which mirrors the subjunctive mood of Persian. This construction has equal currency alongside the inherited Turkic construction:

Lexicon
Azeri is Oghuz in provenance and thus shares the majority of its core lexicon with other members of that clade, particularly Turkish and Turkmen. However, Azeri shares some lexical affinities with Central Asia (i.e. Uzbek) vis-à-vis Anatolian Turkish: e.g. indi “now” (cf. Uzbek: endi; Turkish şimdi); yaxšı “good” (Uzbek: yaxshi; Turkish: iyi); öz “oneself” (Uzbek: o’z; Turkish: kendi); tapmax “to find” (Uzbek: topmoq; Turkish: bulmak).

Some alternative forms are in use compared to Northern (Soviet) Azeri: e.g. eləmax for etmək “to do”.

Calques from Persian are pervasive, exceeding in number those found in Northern Azeri and Turkish: aradan getmax (from از بين رفتن az bayn raftan “to be annihilated”); xaheš elirəm (from خواهش ميكنم xwâheš mikonam “please; you’re welcome”); buyurmax in the formal meaning of “to say” (from فرمودن farmudan; e.g. o jür če buyurduz “just as you said…”);  numerous izâfe constructions modeled on Persian patterns using the helping verbs vermək “to give”, eləmax “to do”, čıxmax “to go out”, vurmax “to hit”, e.g. idamə vermək “to continue”(from ادامه دادن edâme dâdan); vərziš eləmax “to exercise” (ورزش كردن varzeš kardan).

Written by Afsheen Sharifzadeh, a graduate of Tufts University focusing on Iran and the Caucasus. This narrative stems from a brief trip to Larestan, Iran during the Persian New Year (late March-early April) of 2014. 

Roots in Larestan
My father is from Lārestān, a non-Persian-speaking, hybrid Sunni-Shi’a pocket tucked away in the southeastern-most portion of Fārs province in Iran (ancient Persis), just inland from the Persian Gulf. There, in the embraces of rolling foothills dotted with chamomile shrubs and tamarisk trees, he passed his childhood and adolescence, before moving to Shiraz to attend what was then the royal Pahlavi University; the premier university of early modern Iran. Today, Lar proper is a bustling regional center of over 50,000 souls, replete with luxury apartments, its own international airport, a multi-purpose sports stadium, foreign language schools and gated orchard communities. But his memories of Lar—which happens to be located atop the seismic fault lines of two tectonic plates—are as bitter as they are sweet. On April 24, 1960, a devastating earthquake struck Lar, reducing a large portion of the historic sun-baked brick and timber town to rubble, and claiming the lives of about 3,500 of its inhabitants (about a fourth of its population at the time). Following this tragedy, Lar’s inhabitants set out to construct a new settlement with government funding slightly north of the ruins, which they called Lār-e Jadīd or “New Lar”, while Lār-e Ghadīm “Old Lar” remained in a state of ruin but was gradually rebuilt and resettled by migrant workers from surrounding villages over the decades. At the time of writing, per my personal observation the two settlements are contiguous with each other.

Ruins at Lār-e Ghadīm, or “Old Lar” (2014). An earthquake in 1960 reduced the historic town to rubble. 

My father’s immediate family was dispersed for days following the 1960 earthquake, and it took hours of pursuit to retrieve all 14 of his siblings. For a time following 1960, informants report that Lar was reduced to a pile of rocks inhabited by a dwindling population living in abject misery. The tragedy left an imprint on his childhood and spawned within him a yearning for migration and higher education, first on the well-trodden path to Shiraz and finally to the United States. This article is a compilation of my observations from a brief journey through Lar, focusing on peculiarities in the culture and history of the region and Lari, a modern iteration of “Middle Persian” (inasmuch as it refers to the southern Middle Iranian vernaculars in Fārs province prior to the spread of Muslim New Persian from Khorāsān) and the language of my father’s boyhood.

Larestan (marked in red) consists of a series of settlements, the largest of which is Lar. 

Lar: Jewish origins
Lar was probably originally a Jewish settlement, and one thing we know for certain is that it boasted a prosperous Jewish community as early as the 16th century. The French traveler Jean-Baptiste Thévenot reports that most of the inhabitants of Lar were Jewish silk farmers when he visited Larestan in 1687, and a Spaniard who visited the town earlier in 1607 met there a “messenger from Zion” named Judah. But as with other Persian Jewish communities (save the Georgian Jewish deportees employed as silk worm farmers in Māzanderān), the Jews of Lar suffered at the hands of the Safavid rulers during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Indeed, the pogroms and mass conversions are described by the Judeo-Persian chronicler Bābāi ibn Luṭf. According to him, the persecutions throughout Persia during the reign of Shāh Abbās I began some time before 1613 and originated in the city of Lar, whose rabbi had converted to Islam and taken the name Abul-Hasan Lāri. This renegade Lari rabbi secured a royal edict (farmān) whereby every Jew in Persia was required to wear a discriminatory badge and headgear. This in turn culminated in the abrupt expulsion of hundreds of Jews from the capital city, Isfahan, on account of their conspicuous newfound “impurity”.

Lar was nonetheless historically a center of Judeo-Persian literary activity, and among the notable scribes and translators was Judah of Lar in early 16th century. A Florentine traveler, Giambattista Vecchietti (1552–1619), even collected ancient Judeo-Persian manuscripts from Lar and brought them back to Europe. We know that a Jewish community existed in Lar through the beginning of the 20th century, and according to BM (1907, p. 51) there were 70 Jews living there in 1907. They were soon thereafter expelled from the city and walked all the way to the northern city of Jahrom, eventually settling in Shiraz and thence Palestine. Regrettably, there remain no traces of their synagogues or other socio-cultural spaces within Lar proper.

Persian Jews in Shiraz, early 20th century

The language spoken by Jews in Lar, historically known as “Judeo-Shirazi” (endonyms: Jūdī, Chodī), is a member of the Larestani branch of Iranian languages and was written using the Hebrew alphabet. It is closely related to modern Lari, and served as the medium for their literary productions. Perhaps it helped preserve the local dialect as distinct from New Persian for many centuries after the Islamization of Fārs. Unlike New Persian, which evolved from the Pārsig-Dari language of the Sassanian court at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Larestani appears to be derived from various unattested Middle Persian dialects spoken by the Zoroastrian and Jewish inhabitants of Fārs province prior to the spread of New Persian. Modern Laris may have originally been a semi-nomadic Sunni pastoralist group with ancestors who had extended contact with the inhabitants of the Lur- and Kurdish-dominated highlands to the northwest of Fārs, and gradually displaced the Jews over several centuries (see discussion below). It is possible, based on historical reports, that many local Jews converted to Islam following a hypothetical trajectory of Muslim transhumance into the region.

Despite the absence of any material or linguistic evidence of a Jewish past within Lar proper, the non-Muslim heritage of Larestan remains at least nominally operative in the ethnic consciousness of modern Larestanis. One Lari informant mistakenly identified the region’s original inhabitants as Armenians (Christians)—indicating that a general awareness of Lar’s non-Muslim past remains ingrained in the social memory of the people, regardless of academic familiarity with the subject.

Ruins at Lār-e Ghadim, or “Old Lar.”

Arabic Bilingualism in Larestan

Because of its location on the caravan route connecting southern Iran to the Persian Gulf ports, Larestan has traditionally held an opportune position in trade with Arabic-speaking territories across the Persian Gulf. But throughout the medieval period Larestan was nearly always an obscure region, seldom becoming involved in the politics and conflicts of mainstream Persia. Most of the settlements within Larestan including Khür, Khonj, Gerāsh, Fishvar, Evaz, and Bastak are Sunni Muslim (اهل تسنن ahl-e tasannon), except for the city of Lar itself, which like the rest of Iran is majority Shi’a (اهل تشيع ahl-e tashayyo’). The Sunni inhabitants of Larestan maintain particularly close cultural and economic ties with their coreligionists across the Persian Gulf, and can be seen sporting conspicuously Qatari- and Emirati-style hijabs and garments in the central bazar of Lar proper. One entrepreneurial family has even opened a shawarma restaurant in Khür (c. 2014) that has recently blossomed into a gathering place for eager patrons hailing from far and wide in the region. As such, Gulf Arab fashions and tastes are flourishing in Lar, and there is a high degree of Arabic language proficiency.

The interior of an Emamzadeh in Lar, Iran (2014). Mirrorwork is a common feature of Iranian Islamic architecture. 

Within my own extended family, Arabic proficiency is pervasive. Two uncles worked their careers in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, and in particular are familiar with Iraqi and Gulf folk songs, including Meyhāna (ميحانة) and Bayn el-’asr wel Maghreb (بين العصر و المغرب). The performance of these songs together with my uncles, often accompanied by a tombak, served as a common form of entertainment at family gatherings.

Lari families have historically transplanted to Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE– where they are known collectively in Arabic as ‘ajāyem (عجايم; sing. ‘ajami عجمي). Laris have inhabited these countries for generations, usually maintaining their language and cuisine. Dubai’s oldest quarter, known as Al Bastakiya (البستكية), is namesake to the enterprising textile and pearl traders from Bastak, Larestan who settled and developed the area. My own family has relatives in Bahrain as well as a large branch situated in Qatar, descended from an aunt who married a Lari-Qatari sheikh and bore him eight children about half a century ago.

Al-Bastakiya is Dubai’s most historic quarter. Established at the end of the 19th century by affluent textile and pearl traders from Bastak, Larestan, its labyrinthine adobe lanes are lined with restored merchant’s houses, art galleries, cafés, and boutique hotels. Pictured here are two prominent bādgirs (بادگير), or “windcatchers”– a quintessentially Iranian architectural form encountered in Lari colonies throughout the Persian Gulf region.

Men from Lar have a long history as merchants engaged in Indian Ocean maritime trade and in local overland trading between the Persian Gulf and inland Iran. Laris assumed a new role in the trade of the Persian Gulf region with the beginning of oil production in Kuwait and other small states after World War II. At that time, Lari men like my uncles began migrating to Kuwait to open small shops that catered to the huge influx of migrants working in the oil industry and in construction. Typically, Lari men left their families and worked in Kuwait for periods of 18 months to several years before returning home for six month visits.

The Friday Mosque, Lar, Iran (2014)

In contrast to the educated migrants from Egypt and Palestine who staffed the Kuwaiti bureaucracy, and the uneducated migrants from Arab countries, Pakistan and Asia who worked as unskilled laborers, almost all Laris were engaged in retail trade. Typically a man would start out in business with a small shop in partnership with another man, often a relative. The stores ranged from green groceries to import shops. Remittances also raised the standard of living for most Lar families allowing them to buy a variety of consumer goods. In fact, the smuggling of such articles as Japanese TV sets, wrist watches and tape recorders was a lucrative side business for many migrants. Following the betterment of the economic situation in Iran in the 80’s, the tradition of Lari labor export to Kuwait declined significantly and finally ended. Today, Laris look closer across the Gulf–to the Emirates and Qatar, for exporting labor and investments.

Larestani Cuisine

Larestani people’s diet consists of a mixture of traditional Persian foods, as well as local dishes and those from surrounding coastal regions on the Persian Gulf. A few representative local dishes are described below:

-Kabāb Kenje-ye Lāri: a traditional dish consisting of young lamb marinated in strained yogurt, onion, black pepper and salt for several days, skewered and barbecued over an open flame.

-Polo malakh: Small shrimp (malakh) cooked with mung beans, saffron, salt, and black pepper served with pomegranate molasses sauce as a condiment.

-Breads: A variety of breads are made from unsifted wheat flour, including ninanü, botonür, bālatova, jarādak, which are cooked quickly on a griddle. These breads are seasoned with ma’va– the local favorite seasoning consisting of ground mustard seeds, dried ground māhi-e motü (a local anchovy variety imported from the Persian Gulf coast), and salt which is fermented together under direct sunlight over 3-4 months. This base is often accompanied by bābüna (chamomile) and konjed (sesame seeds). Other traditional breads include taftu (the dough consists of unsifted wheat flour, sunflower oil, whole milk, baking soda, salt; topped with sesame and golrang, a local herbal food coloring resembling saffron, and baked in a ceramic tannur oven), taptapi, gapok and non-e nāzok.

-Tokhm o dol and tokhm o kher: eggs seasoned with turmeric, salt, black pepper and tossed with a variety of local mushrooms gathered from surrounding mountains (two varieties: dol and kher)

-Khoresht-e khoraü: a local leafy green (khoraü) stewed with lamb, potato, and onion and seasoned with turmeric, salt and pepper served with rice.

Kabāb Kenje-ye Lāri served with traditional taptapü bread and fresh Persian basil. Photo taken at the author’s family orchard outside of Lar, 2014. 

Comparison with Sorani Kurdish and Persian

Larestani is an Indo-European language belonging to the southwestern subgroup of the Iranian branch, and is spoken by about ~150,000 people in Iran and abroad. Like Persian, Larestani is Indo-European in its core vocabulary, however it also features an albeit small number of loans from non-Indo-European languages in its general vocabulary, particularly Classical Arabic (via Persian) and Gulf Arabic (via bilingualism). Other languages in the southwestern subgroup of the Iranian branch include Modern Persian and all of its ancestors and sisters, Luri, Kuhmareyi, and the Kumzari language of northern Oman. As discussed above, the Larestani languages are direct descendants of unattested Middle Persian vernaculars that survived the spread of Muslim “New Persian” from the Khorāsān and Central Asia. All of the Larestani languages and dialects together form a single speech community, despite considerable lexical and morphological variation. For example, whereas Khüri has ēkā “here”, in Lar proper the same word is heard as enke, but these variations are within the bounds of mutual intelligibility to native speakers. Kurdish languages belong to the Northwestern subgroup of Iranian, but there are a number of analogous lexical and morphological paradigms in Kurdish and Larestani that are worthy of noting. I attribute these similarities to areal features, whence the ancestral Proto-Larestani and Proto-Kuhmareyi languages must have been in contact with ancestral Kurdish languages at some point in their development following the Old Iranian stage (Kuhmareyi even features a definite marker –aku, reminiscent of Kurdish -aka):

Larestani and Kurdish have together retained a number of phonemic archaisms from the Middle Iranian stage that have disappeared in modern Persian. For example, Lari and Kurdish have a rounded front vowel at the beginning of the word “we” (Lari: amā, Kurdish: emā), while modern Persian has mā. Rounded long vowels –ō, –ē from Middle Iranian are preserved in Larestani (Lari: gōsh vs. Persian: gūsh “ear”) and Kurdish (Kurdish: rōj, Lari: rōz, Persian: rūz “day”) except for in modern Persian borrowings, which are assimilated (Lari güshi “telephone”). Lexical archaisms are numerous and include Lari gapü “big” and got (from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrewd-, *gʰer-, cognate to English great, Latin grandis, Albanian ngre), whereas Old Persian adopted a Median word, now pronounced bozorg (from Proto-Indo-European*weǵ- Old English: wacan, wacian; English: wake. Originally meaning “endowed with generative power”, from Old Persian vazra- via palatilization and sibiliation, already literary Old Persian vazarka, Middle Persian wuzurg).

Larestani and Kurdish both share a postposed directional complement à “to”, and in Lārestāni a derivative o- is used to express general possession, “to have”, when complemented with a pronomial enclitic (note immediate possession in Lārestāni parallel to Arabic is expressed using pronomial clitic + bā; i.e. ma qalam omnebā “I don’t have a pen [with me right now]”). Kurdish uses a possessive pronoun + haya/niya. Larestani: chedem à madrasa, Sorani Kurdish: chūm à madrasa “I went to school”. Persian does not use a directional complement.

The dative construction takes two forms in Larestani: one is the postponed directional complement attached to both nouns and pronouns discussed above (Larestani: à ma = “to me’), and the second is a more conservative dative construction that takes the form of a postpositional suffix -va attached to the pronoun it modifies. The latter is highly unusual in the southwestern Iranian group, which includes Persian, although postpositions are found in Caspian languages. The construction is notably parallel to Oghuz Turkic –(y)a/-(y)e, and is encountered elsewhere in northern Tajik Persian dialects, where it developed under the influence of eastern Turkic (Tajik -ba > Uzbek -ga “to”). Perhaps Larestani obtained this exclusively pronomial dative construction from the neighboring Qashqai Turkic, but there is no evidence of widespread bilingualism or substrate as in the case of northern Tajik to explain an eccentric morphological innovation of this kind. Instead, it is likely a vestige of the Middle Iranian stage, inasmuch as a multitude of shared features between Larestani and peripheral Iranian languages are the likely heirlooms of an ancestral dialect continuum that connected genetically distant cousins (for example, lexical and morphological parallels between Larestani and Talyshi).

Larestani verb inflection is strikingly different from Persian, her Southwestern Iranian-branch sister. The issue of ergativity in Larestani is discussed below. Three features set the Persian and Lari dialect groups in Fars province squarely apart from each other: (1) the ending of the second-person singular, Fars dialects –ē/-ī, Larestan dialects –eš; (2) the imperfective marker, Fars dialects mē-/mī-, Larestan dialects a(t)-; (3) the existence in the Larestan dialects of a present progressive by means of a locative construction based on the verbal noun. Moreover, the particular way of regularizing verb stem formation in the Larestan dialects may suggest input from a non-Iranian system. The pronomial clitics of Larestani are placed in different positions from those of Persian, with a resemblance to the ergative construction of Kurdish. In addition, Larestani has a split proclitic-mesoclitic system of verbal negation: sho’äshā  “they can”→ shonāshā “they cannot” but dā “S/he comes”→ nedā “S/he does not come”, while Persian has only proclitic: mitavānand; nemitavānand “they can; they cannot.”; as does Kurdish: datwanin; nátwanin “they can; they cannot.”

In Kurdish, the simple past tense of transitive verbs is formed from the past stem of the verb and an agent affix—the ergative construction. Modern Larestani languages, alongside Kurdish, display split-ergativity (or perhaps more rightly termed, vestigial ergativity); ergativity is present both according to the Kurdish paradigm, as well as erratically in transitive and intransitive verbs in both the preterite and perfective aspects (e.g. omgot “I said”, otnāshā “You cannot”; but khätem “I slept“, nāfämesh “You do not understand”). The former two constructions have intransitive ergative character, but the latter two illustrate the fact that Larestani also features nominative/accusative morphology. Ergativity is thus more pervasive in Larestani than Kurdish, but only incongruously so. Persian is a non-ergative language.

Sorani Kurdish (except for the dialect of Suleymaniyah in Iraq) has da- as habitual and progressive verbal prefix, while Larestani has prefix a- for habitual and a- + a medial affix –dā- for the complete progressive construction

Entrance to the author’s uncle’s orchard (bāgh) located southwest of Lar city, where families retreat for feasts, gardening and recreation. 

The Future of Lari

No two people speak the same language exactly alike. As such, languages may evolve insularly among speakers of the same language in the general absence of external pressures (for example, Icelandic). But language change is not random—it flows in the direction of accents and phrases admired and emulated by large numbers of people. Once a target accent is selected, the structure of the sound changes that move a speaker away from his or her own mode of speech is governed by rules. Sound changes follow unspoken and unconscious rules – the sound changes are not idiosyncratic or confined to certain words; rather, they spread systematically to all similar sounds in the language.

Lari is not an exception to this rule. As an oral language, Lari literature is scant and limited exclusively to poetry. Without a standardized, pervasive literary form or a compendium of Lari literature, the language is particularly volatile to assimilative pressures. The various dialects are considerably different from each other and seem to be distinguished primally upon village and secondarily upon Sunni-Shi’a sect affiliation. The language of school education is Persian, and all educated Larestanis speak Persian as their second language. Persian has also become the language of interethnic communication, particularly between Laris and the Turkic Qashqai element in Larestan. Many Larestanis with ties to the Gulf (mainly Sunnis from Khür, Gerash, Bastak, and Evaz) speak Arabic as a second or third language. As such, the Shi’a Lari dialect has been Persianized in its lexicon and phonology and the Sunni dialects have been Arabicized—processes that have accelerated in the past several decades and the former may ultimately lead to endangerment.

I will only deal with lexical assimilation with Persian, as phonological assimilation is outside the scope of this article. Of note, I was surprised to behold an episode of lexical transformation between my father and his siblings. My father, having left Larestan over 40 years ago, speaks a vernacular true to the spoken language of that era, while those who have remained within Larestan have been subjected to assimilation pressures as a result of improved school education and communications with the rest of Iran, as well as increased migrant traffic in both directions. As such, my father’s vernacular features lexical archaisms that have since been rendered obsolete in favor of Persian borrowings in the current Lari vernacular.

The future of Lari seems bleak, as generation Y has effectively ceased to employ Lari, even as a mode of family communication. As such, Lari is to be classified as unstable, for the sphere of its use is steadily diminishing. Socio-cultural stigmatization of Larestan by inhabitants of Iran’s major urban centers compounded by new and improved contacts with the rest of Iran via Persian language television and radio broadcast have inspired generation Y to emulate Tehrani Persian speech, even in response to their parents speaking in Lari. Moreover, knowledge of and proficiency in Persian is associated with upward social mobility, which in turn has influenced the older generations to incorporate Persian words and phrases into their speech. Of note, one can hear the Persianized khūbesh? instead of Lari khäshesh? (“Are you well?”)– a form that had no currency fifty years ago but is now canonical if not preferred.

Sources

Anthony, David W. “The Horse, The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Princeton Review Press: 2007.

Bonine, Michael E.; Nikki R. Keddi. Modern Iranian Dialectics.

Fischel, Walter Joseph; Netzer, Amnon. “Lar.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

Loeb, Laurence D. Outcaste (RLE Iran D): Jewish Life in Southern Iran.

McIntire, Emily Wells. “From Lar to Kuwait.” The Search for Work. Cultural Survival Inc., issue 7.4 (Winter 1983).