مازندراني زبان است يا گويش؟

Mazandarani: Language or Dialect?

Spoken by some four million inhabitants of the Caspian province of Mazandaran in northern Persia, Mazandarani has various dialects current in the towns of Sari, the provincial capital, Amul, Babul, Shahi, Bihshahr, etc. Most of the population, however, dwells in a series of loosely-knit villages spread over the littoral lowlands as well as in the piedmonts and higher valleys of the province. The urbanization of this prosperous province in recent decades and its proximity to Tehran has resulted in the widespread use of Persian, gradually marginalizing Mazandarani. While the more secluded localities still retain their distinct dialects, the urban variants are increasingly becoming a mix language, to the extent that one gets the incorrect impression that the Mazandarani is merely a dialect of Persian. Mazandarani has in fact become a much-reduced language, as is the case for her sister Gilaki and many other idioms that seem to share the fate of extinction in the near future. The author attempts to define Mazandarani from two viewpoints: dialectal and social. A sociolinguist may consider Persian as the only major language in Persia that meets both criteria of standardization and written status; everything else is something else (dialect, vernacular, patois, etc.). Turkish, Turkmen, and Arabic do indeed meet these criteria, but in neighboring countries. Kurdish and Balochi too are shared with tribes across the national borders, but they lack standard forms, and literacy in them alone is not sufficient to make a person "literate" in Persia - thus both are commonly believed to be dialects. Other "dialects" spoken in Persia are non-written, including Mazandarani and Gilaki, despite their large number of speakers. Then there are several arrays of speech communities in individual or groups of villages and townships, from the Tatic groups in the northwest to the vernaculars of Simnan and those spread over thecentral Iranian Plateau as far south as the towns of Isfahan and Yazd, as well as the so-called Perside group, namely Lurl, Bakhtlarl, and the dialects spoken in southern provinces. None of these have been historically independent of neither the Persianate civilization nor Persian, once the lingua franca of the Iranian world and beyond. An exception is Armenian, spoken by a sizeable well-off urban community with a strong sense of ethnic identity, who have their own schools and press tuned with those in the neighboring Armenia. So is Assyrian, the language of a distinct church with members spread all over the world. But there are no commonly accepted linguistic criteria for differentiating between a language and a dialect (or vernacular or patois). However, if we take the mutual intelligibility as a criterion, we will arrive at the following conclusions for Mazandarani: (1) most of its dialects are mutually intelligible, and (2) even the persianized forms of Mazandarani are not intelligible to the speakers of Persian. In fact the dissimilarities between the two languages are profound; the linguistic traits such as abundance of postpositions, binary nominal cases, verb structure, and, above all, the lexicon set Mazandarani quite apart from Persian. But what really discards the incorrect notion that Mazandarani is a "corrupt" form of Persian is diachronic investigation. While Persian is a southwest dialect, comparative-historical phonology places Mazandarani in the northwest group of the Iranian language family, together with the Gilaki, Tatic, Komisenian, and Gorani-Zaza subgroups, and the Central Dialects. Nonetheless, Mazandarani (like its Caspian sister Gilaki) shows some serious inconsistencies in this respect, e.g. the characteristically SW s in a seemingly authentic word like os "pregnant" (< Olr. a-pudra-). Lastly, Mazandarani is a language with a history of documentation second in age only to New Persian, among the living Iranian languages. Its history has not received the attention it deserves.