Misplaced Pages

Mazandarani
مازِرونی‎ (Mazeruni) تَبَری (Tabari)
Mazanderani (Mazeruni) written in Nastaliq script. (مازِرونی)
Native to	Iran (Province of Mazandaran and parts of the provinces of Alborz, Tehran, Qazvin, Semnan and Golestan)
Region	South coast of the Caspian Sea
Ethnicity	4.6 million Mazanderani (2021)
Native speakers	1.36 million (2021)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Northwestern Caspian Mazandarani
Dialects	Gorgani-Mazandarani (East) Katuli-Mazandarani (East) Tabari-Mazandarani (Center) Kojuri-Mazandarani (West) Kelarestaqi-Mazandarani (West) Gilaki-Mazandarani (West) Galeshi-Mazandarani (South) Taleqani-Mazandarani (South) Shahmirzadi (South) Ilikaei (South) Qasrani (South)
Writing system	Persian alphabet
Official status
Regulated by	None. However, the Linguistic faculty of Mazandaran University officially gathers materials and resources about the language.
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: mzn – Mazandarani srz – Shahmirzadi
Glottolog	maza1305  Mazanderani–Shahmirzadi
ELP	Shahmirzadi
Areas where Mazandarani is spoken as the mother tongue
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Mazandarani (Mazanderani: مازِرونی, Mazeruni; also spelled Mazani (مازنی) or Tabari (تبری); also called Taveri, Mazeruni, Tati, Geleki & Galeshi) is an Iranian language of the Northwestern branch spoken by the Mazandarani people. As of 2021, there were 1.36 million native speakers. The language appears to be decreasing, as it is threatened, and due to the majority of its speakers shifting to Iranian Persian. As a member of the Northwestern branch (the northern branch of Western Iranian), etymologically speaking, it is rather closely related to Gilaki and also related to Persian, which belongs to the Southwestern branch. Though the Persian language has influenced Mazandarani to a great extent, Mazandarani still survives as an independent language with a northwestern Iranian origin.

Mazandarani is closely related to Gilaki, and the two languages have similar vocabularies. The Gilaki and Mazandarani languages (but not other Iranian languages) share certain typological features with Caucasian languages (specifically the non-Indo-European South Caucasian languages), reflecting the history, ethnic identity, and close relatedness to the Caucasus region and Caucasian peoples of Mazandaranis and Gilak people.

Etymology

The name Mazanderani (and variants of it) derives from the name of the historical region of Mazandaran (Mazerun in Mazanderani), which was part of former Kingdom of Tapuria. People traditionally call their language Tabari, as the Tabari themselves do.

The name Tapuri / Tabari (which was the name of an ancient language spoken somewhere in former Tapuria) is now used in preference to the name Mazandarani by the young.

However, both Gilan and Mazanderan formed part of the state known as Tapuria.

The earliest references to the language of Mazandaran, called Tabari, are to be found in the works of the early Muslim geographers. Al-Muqaddasī (or Moqaisi, 10th century), for example, notes: "The languages of Komish and Gurgan are similar, they use hā, as in hā-dih and hāk-un, and they are sweet , related to them is the language of Tabaristan, save for its speediness."

History

Among the living Iranian languages, Mazanderani has one of the longest written traditions, from the tenth to the fifteenth century. This status was achieved during the long reign of the independent and semi-independent rulers of Mazandaran in the centuries after the Arab invasion.

The rich literature of this language includes books such as Marzban Nameh (later translated into Persian) and the poetry of Amir Pazevari. Use of Mazanderani, however, has been in decline for some time. Its literary and administrative prominence had begun to diminish in favor of Persian by the time of the integration of Mazandaran into the national administration in the early seventeenth century.

Classification

The Mazanderani language is closely related to Gilaki and the two languages have similar vocabularies. In 1993, according to Ethnologue, there were three million native Mazanderani speakers.

The dialects of Mazanderani are Saravi, Amoli, Baboli, Ghaemshahri, Chaloosi, Nuri, Shahsavari, Ghasrani, Shahmirzadi, Damavandi, Firoozkoohi, Astarabadi and Katouli.

The native people of Aliabad-e Katul, Gorgan, Kordkuy and Bandar-e Gaz in Golestan province are Mazandarani and speak the mazandarani language. The native people of Shemiranat, Damavand and Firuzkuh in Tehran province are Mazandarani and speak the mazandarani language. The native people of north of Karaj and Taleqan in Alborz province are Mazandarani and speak the mazandarani language. The people of east of Alamut in Qazvin province are Mazandarani and speak the mazandarani language. The native of people of Aradan, Garmsar ,Shahmirzad and north of Damghan in Semnan province are Mazandarani and speak the mazandarani language. The native people of Galugah, Behshahr, Neka, Sari, Shahi, Babol, Amol, Nowshahr, Chalus, Kelardasht, Abbasabad and Tonekabon in Mazandaran province are Mazanderani people and speak the Mazanderani language.

Grammar

Mazanderani is an inflected and genderless language. It is SOV, but in some tenses it may be SVO, depending on the particular dialect involved.

Typology

Morphology

Just as in other modern Iranian languages, there is no distinction between the dative and accusative cases, and the nominative in the sentence takes almost no indicators but may be inferred from word order (depending on dialect it may end in a/o/e). Since Mazanderani lacks articles, there is no inflection for nouns in the sentence (no modifications for nouns). For definition, nouns take the suffix e (me dətere meaning The daughter of mine while me dəter means my daughter). The indefinite article for single nouns is a-tā with tā for determination of number (a-tā kijā meaning a girl). There exist some remnants of old Mazanderani indicating that, in the nominative case, female nouns used to end in a, while male nouns ended in e (as in jənā meaning the woman and mərdē meaning the man). Grammatical gender is still present in certain modern languages closely related to Mazandarani such as Semnani, Sangesari and Zazaki.

Pronouns

In the Mazandarani language, independent personal pronouns have three cases: active, passive and possessive.

Conjugation

Conjugation (hākārden) "to work" in Mazandarani language (Sari dialect).

Usage

Function cases

Adjectives

Notable postpositions

Adpositions in Mazanderani are after words, while most of other languages including English and Persian have preposition systems in general. The only common postpositions that sometimes become preposition are Še and tā. Frequently used postpositions are:

Suffixes

The list below is a sample list obtained from the Online Mazanderani-Persian dictionary.

Locatives

Subjectives

Phonology

Vowels

/a/ may also range to near-open or a more back . Allophones of /e, u, o, ɑ/ are heard as . /ə/ can also be heard as or .

Consonants

/w/ appears as an allophone of /v/ in word-final position. /ɾ/ may appear as a voiceless trill in word-final position . An occasional glottal stop /ʔ/ or voiceless uvular fricative /ʁ/ or voiced plosive /ɢ/ may also be heard, depending on the dialect.

Orthography

Mazanderani is commonly written in the Perso-Arabic script. However, some use the Roman alphabet, for example in SMS messages.

Vocabulary

Spoken in a territory sheltered by the high Alborz mountains, Mazanderani preserves many ancient Indo-European words no longer in common use in modern Iranian languages such as Persian. Listed below are a few common Mazanderani words of archaic, Indo-European provenance with Vedic cognates.

Mazandarani is rich in synonyms, some such nouns also retaining the gender they possessed in Indo-European times: for instance the words miš, gal, gerz all have the meaning of mouse, although they are not all of the same gender. While many Indo-Iranian languages use a masculine noun taking such related forms as muš or muska or mušk, in Mazandarani the most commonly used name for the mouse is the feminine noun gal.

Another example relates to the cow, the most important animal in the symbolism of Indo-European culture: in Mazanderani there are more than 1000 recognized words used for different types of cow. The table below lists some specimens of this rich vocabulary. In Mazandaran there are even contests held to determine those with the greatest knowledge of this bovine nomenclature.

Influences exerted by Mazanderani

Modern-day of Iran

In Iran, there are some popular companies and products, like Rika (boy) or Kija (girl), which take their name from Mazanderani words.

In non-Iranian languages

There are some Mazanderani loanwords in the Turkmen language.

Examples

The following verses are in an eastern Mazandarani dialect spoken in the Caspian littoral in northern Iran. They were transcribed and translated by Maryam Borjian and Habib Borjian.

References

In dates given below, A.P. denotes the Iranian calendar, the solar calendar (365 days per year) which is official in Iran and Afghanistan.

1. ^ Mazandarani at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
   Shahmirzadi at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
2. "Considerations about the dialect of Alamut district from the northern dialects of Iran". پرتال جامع علوم انسانی.
3. Jaafari Dehaghi, Mahmoud; Khalilipour, Nazanin; Jaafari Dehaghi, Shima. Iranian Languages and Dialects Past and Present. Tehran. p. 261.
4. Borjian, Habib (16 July 2018). "کاهش توجه به زبان مازندرانی در قرن بیستم" [Decreased attention to Mazandarani language in the 20th century] (in Persian). Islamic Republic News Agency. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
5. "ساری | مرکز دائرةالمعارف بزرگ اسلامی". www.cgie.org.ir. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
6. Coon, "Iran:Demography and Ethnography" in Encyclopedia of Islam, Volume IV, E.J. Brill, pp. 10,8. Excerpt: "The Lurs speak an aberrant form of Archaic Persian" See maps also on page 10 for distribution of Persian languages and dialect
7. Kathryn M. Coughlin, "Muslim cultures today: a reference guide," Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. p. 89: "...Iranians speak Persian or a Persian dialect such as Gilaki or Mazandarani"
8. Dalb, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More Than 400 Languages. Columbia University Press. p. 226. ISBN 978-0-231-11568-1.
9. ^ Nasidze, Ivan; Quinque, Dominique; Rahmani, Manijeh; Alemohamad, Seyed Ali; Stoneking, Mark (2006). "Concomitant Replacement of Language and mtDNA in South Caspian Populations of Iran". Current Biology. 16 (7): 668–673. Bibcode:2006CBio...16..668N. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.02.021. PMID 16581511.
10. Academic American Encyclopedia By Grolier Incorporated, page 294
11. Stilo, Donald L. (1981). "The Tati Language Group in the Sociolinguistic Context of Northwestern Iran and Transcaucasia". Iranian Studies. 14 (3/4): 137–185. doi:10.1080/00210868108701585. JSTOR 4310364.
12. "Bilingualism in Mazandaran: Peaceful Coexistence with Persian". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.501.9468.
13. ^ Borjian, Habib (2004). "Māzandarān: Language and People". Iran & the Caucasus. 8 (2). Brill: 289–328. doi:10.1163/1573384043076045. JSTOR 4030997.
14. Windfuhr, G. L. 1989. New Iranian languages: Overview. In Rüdiger Schmitt, ed., Compendium linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: L. Reichert. pp. 246–249.
15. Borjian, Maryam. 2005. Bilingualism in Mazandaran: Peaceful Coexistence With Persian Archived September 21, 2006, at the Wayback Machine. Language, Communities and Education. Languages, Communities & Education: A Volume of Graduate Student Research. New York: Society for International Education Archived 2011-07-27 at the Wayback Machine, Teachers College, Columbia University. pp. 65–73.
16. Mazanderani language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
17. "Spoken L1 Language: Mazanderani". Glottolog 4.6.
18. Windfuhr, G. L. (1989). "New Iranian languages: Overview". In Rüdiger Schmitt (ed.). Compendium linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: L. Reichert. p. 490.
19. Fakhr-Rohani, Muhammad-Reza. 2004. She means only her 'husband': politeness strategies amongst Mazanderani-speaking rural women. (Conference abstract) CLPG Conference, University of Helsinki, Finland, PDF
20. Johanson, Lars. Turkic-Iranian Contact Areas Historical and Linguistic Aspects. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006.
21. Csató, Éva Ágnes, Bo Isaksson, and Carina Jahani. Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
22. Borjian, Habib (2019). "The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq". Iranian Studies. 52 (3–4): 555. doi:10.1080/00210862.2019.1611371.
23. Borjian, Habib (2019). "The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq". Iranian Studies. 52 (3–4): 561. doi:10.1080/00210862.2019.1611371.
24. Yoshie, Satoko. 1996. Sārī Dialect. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. Series: Iranian Studies; 10.
25. Shokri, Guiti; Jahani, Carina; Barani, Hossein (2013). When Tradition Meets Modernity: Five Life Stories from the Galesh Community in Ziarat, Golestan, Iran. Uppsala Universitet.
26. Borjian, Habib (2019). The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq. Iranian Studies.
27. "language-keyboard.com - language-keyboard Resources and Information". www.language-keyboard.com.
28. بهشهر, شهرداری. "شهرداری بهشهر". www.behshahr.ir.
29. Nasri-Ashrafi, Jahangir-e (ed.). Farhang-e vāžegān-e Tabarī . v. 5, p. 5, Tehran: Eḥyā’-ketāb”: 2002/1381 A.P. A comparative glossary containing lexical units from almost all major urban and rural centers of the region of the three provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran, and Golestan. Reviewed in Iran and the Caucasus, 2006, 10(2). Volume 4 contains a Persian-Mazanderani index of approximately 190 pp. Volume 5 includes a grammar of the Mazanderani language.
30. Borjian, Habib; Borjian, Maryam (2007). "Mysterious Memories of a Woman: Ethno-Linguistic Materials from Rural Mazandaran". Iran and the Caucasus. 11 (2): 226–254. doi:10.1163/157338407X265469.

Further reading

• Borjian, Habib (2006). "The Oldest Known Texts in New Tabari: The Collection of Aleksander Chodzko". Archiv Orientální. 74 (2): 153–171.
• Borjian, Habib (2006). "A Mazanderani account of the Babi Incident at Shaikh Tabarsi". Iranian Studies. 39 (3): 381–400. doi:10.1080/00210860600808227.
• Borjian, Habib (2006). "Textual sources for the study of Tabari language. I. Old documents". Guyesh-shenâsi. 4.
• Borjian, Habib (2008). "Tabarica II: Some Mazanderani Verbs". Iran and the Caucasus. 12 (1): 73–82. doi:10.1163/157338408X326217.
• Borjian, Habib (2008). "Two Mazanderani Texts from the Nineteenth Century". Studia Iranica. 37 (1): 7–50. doi:10.2143/SI.37.1.2032296.
• Borjian, Habib; Borjian, Maryam (2007). "Ethno-Linguistic Materials from Rural Mazandaran: Mysterious Memories of a Woman". Iran and the Caucasus. 11 (2): 226–254. doi:10.1163/157338407X265469.
• Borjian, Habib; Borjian, Maryam (2008). "The Last Galesh Herdsman: Ethno-Linguistic Materials from South Caspian Rainforests". Iranian Studies. 41 (3): 365–402. doi:10.1080/00210860801981336. S2CID 162393586.
• Le Coq, P. (1989). "Les dialects Caspiens et les dialects du nord-ouest de l'Iran". In Schmitt, Rüdiger (ed.). Compendium linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: L. Reichert. pp. 296–312.
• Nawata, Tetsuo (1984). Māzandarāni. Asian and African Grammatical Manual. Vol. 17. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.
• Shokri, Giti (1990). "Verb Structure in Sāri dialect". Farhang. 6. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies: 217–231.
• Shokri, Giti (1995). Sārī Dialect. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies.
• Shokri, Giti (2006). Ramsarī Dialect. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies.
• Yoshie, Satoko (1996). Sārī Dialect. Iranian Studies. Vol. 10. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

External links

• Society for Iranian Linguistics. Among other services, archives PDFs of articles from linguistics journals, including those written in Persian.
• Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran.
• Audio recordings available for Mazanderani
• Dictionary of Mazanderani, with translations into Saravi, Baboli, and Amoli dialects

• Northwestern Iranian languages
• Subject–verb–object languages
• Verb–subject–object languages
• Languages of Iran
• Mazandaran province
• Caspian languages
• Mazanderani language