Mazandarani

Mazandarani (also known as Mazani, Tabari, and Gilaki) is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken in northern Iran primarily in Mazandaran province (south of the Caspian sea). The three neighboring provinces of Semnan, Golestan, and Tehran are also home to relatively large numbers of Mazandarani speakers. These areas have more than 2 million residents and the language in the region has historically been Mazandarani, but it is difficult to estimate what percentage of them speak Mazandarani today after decades of heavy Persianization.

Mazandarani is closely related with the Gilaki language (spoken in Gilan province, west of Mazandaran). Many Mazandarani speakers (even in the heart of Mazandaran province) refer to their own language as Gilaki or Gelaki, a term used by Persian speakers and linguists worldwide solely to refer to the language spoken in Gilan province. Some have argued that the two language varieties (Gilaki proper and Mazandarani) are dialects of the same language, or form a language continuum. Within the range of dialects known as Mazandarani, a relatively high degree of variation exists, but mutual intelligibility is almost never lost. (The examples in this text are based on the dialect of Amol in central Mazandaran, unless otherwise stated).

Mazandarani is claimed to have one of the oldest written traditions among Iranian languages. In particular, the original version of the classic work Marzban-name is reported to have been written in Mazandarani, which takes the history of the language as a written language back to at least a millennium ago (for arguments against this see Borjian, 2009). Putting aside this disputed claim, however, none of the oldest extant standalone Mazandarani texts seem to date back to earlier than the 14th century C.E. There are, however, sporadic Mazandarani poems quoted in books from as early as the 11th century C.E (see discussion in Borjian, 2009).

Mazandarani is rarely used as a written language today; books and other publications in Mazandaran and the regions around it are almost exclusively in Persian. The language does, however, have some presence in the world wide web. The Perso-Arabic script is usually used for writing Mazandarani, although no agreed-upon standard for mapping the sounds of the language to the characters exists and dialectal variations contributes to diversity of spelling practices.

The use of Mazandarani is rapidly diminishing, especially in urban centers. As a result, existing estimates of the number of speakers of the language may be inaccurate as many young city-dwelling Mazandaranis are not fluent speakers of the language and rely solely on Persian in all contexts.

Phonology

Phonemes

Mazandarani’s phoneme inventory is very similar to that of Persian; most phonological differences between the two languages occur at the level of allophones and more fine-grained phonetic features of the phonemes.

The Persian consonant /ʒ/ is absent in native Mazandarani words, although most Mazandarani speakers in urban areas pronounce it in loan words. In some dialects, the voiced uvular fricative (/ʁ/) is used in place of the Tehrani Persian voiced uvular stop (/ɢ/) in loanwords.

The only major phonemic difference between the vowel inventories of the two languages is the presence of schwa (/ə/) in Mazandarani. It usually corresponds to Persian /o/ in cognates and loanwords from Persian, and in many (mostly rural) dialects of Mazandarani almost completely replaces /o/ (leaving the dialect with 6 vowels). The choice of pronouncing the /o/ in words borrowed from Persian or replacing it (with either /ə/ or /u/) varies by dialect and speaker. In many dialects, the so-called schwa is pronounced slightly higher and further back in the mouth.

Syntax

Head directionality

In contrast to most modern Western Iranian languages, Mazandarani is rather strongly head-final. This is particularly interesting in the case of noun phrases, since the ezafe (or at least what looks like it) is used in Mazandarani but with the reverse order of how it is used in Kurdish languages and Persian. Examples are given below, with the head of a phrase shown in boldface.

NP: /æmir e mɒr/    “Amir’s mother”                    Persian: /mɒdær e amir/
NP: /gæt e dɒr/         “big tree”                                Persian: /deræχt e bozorg/
AP:/χæle gæt/           “very big”                                Persian: /χejli bozorg/
VP:/sikɒ rə bædiə/   “[she/he] saw the duck”      Persian: /ordak ro did/
PP:/væt͡ʃun əsse/      “for the children”                 Persian: /bærɒje bæt͡ʃt͡ʃehɒ/

In the NPs (first two examples above) the ezafe is used between the two words, but the order is the opposite of what is seen in Persian.

In the case of relative clauses, the head noun precedes the relative clause in Mazandarani.

Nouns

There is no gender distinction in Mazandarani, and nouns (unlike pronouns) are not marked for case (but see the discussion on objects below). Indefinite nouns are marked by a preceding word /ættə/ (or /ættɒ/), the word for the numeral “one”. There is no definite marker in Mazandarani (cf. the suffix /e/ as in /pesær-e/ (“the boy”) in colloquial Persian and /əkə/ & /əgə/ in Kurdish languages). As in formal Persian, the noun’s bare form can have either a definite or a generic sense (contrasted in the two examples below).

bɒmʃi gæt niə.
cat      big  is.not
Cats are not big.

bɒmʃi hə-niʃt-ə.
cat      PFV-sit-3SG
The cat sat down.

The native method of making a noun plural in Mazandarani is using the suffix /un/. (For some words, the suffix /hɒ/ or /ɒ/ is also used. This is especially the case for more recent borrowings.)

væt͡ʃə       “child”                væt͡ʃun           “children”
ræfeɢ         “friend”            ræfeɢun         “friends”
rikɒ          “boy”                   rikɒkun         “boys”

Pronouns

There are no enclitic pronouns in Mazandarani. The Mazandarani personal pronouns are shown in the table below.

Edit

Examples using each case are shown below for the first person singular.

Nominative:

mən           intɒ rə         nɒ-χɒ-mə.
1SG.NOM  this  ACC    NEG-want-1SG
I don’t want this.

Accusative:

vərg me             rə          bæ-di-ə.
wolf 1SG.OBL   ACC      PFV-see.PST-3SG
The wolf saw me.

Genitive:

me                per       məælləm-ə.
1SG.OBL    father  teacher-3SG.
My father is a teacher.

The accusative/dative marker

Similar to the role of the morpheme /rɒ/ in Classical Persian, the Mazandarni morpheme /(r)ə/ has two roles. It sometimes marks dative case. More frequently, it marks direct objects in certain situations (most clearly in situations where the object is specific)

me                 rə      mærbut    niə.
1SG.OBL      rə      related      is.not
It doesn’t concern me.

gu      rə  hə-dɒ-ji                       me    rə.
cow   rə  PFV-give.PST-2SG   1SG   rə
You gave the cow to me.

Verbs

As in many Iranian languages, Mazandarani verbs have distinct past and present stems. The present simple is created by simply attaching the appropriate personal ending to the verb’s present stem, as shown in the table below for the verb “to have”.

Edit

The examples above are based on the dialect of Babol. In some dialects of Central Mazandaran including the city of Amol, the final “r” in the verb stem changes to the glide /j/ whenever the personal ending starts with /n/ (e.g. [dɒjni] instead of [dɒrni] for “you have”).

In the past simple tense, the past stem is used, the personal endings are slightly different, and a verbal prefix is used before the stem.

Edit

This verbal prefix is absent in the imperfective past tense (/ʃurdəmə/: “I used to wash”). However, the verbal prefix cannot be interpreted as simply a perfective marker. It appears in imperatives and subjunctives too (e.g. /bæʃur/ – “wash!” and /bæʃurəm/ – “that I wash”), and the infinitive form of the verb (which is made by adding the suffix /æn/ to the 1SG past tense) retains it (e.g. /bæʃurdæn/ – “to wash”). It disappears in the presence of the negation prefixes /næ/ and /nə/.

The verbal prefix used for the verb “to wash” (/bæ/) is the most common verbal prefix, but many verbs have other verbal prefixes. Examples of the other common verbal prefixes are shown below:

/hɒ/:   (/hæ/ in many dialects)
/hɒkərdæn/       “to do”

/hə/:
/həniʃtæn/       “to sit down”

/dæ/:
/dævəssæn/       “to close”

/də/:
/dəmɒssən/:      “to stick”

The verbal prefixes /hə/ and /də/ are probably phonologically reduced forms of /hɒ/ and /dæ/ respectively (at least from a diachronic perspective). All of these verbal prefixes are very uncommon compared to /bæ/ and its reduced form /bə/, suggesting that /bæ/ is the default verbal prefix and the rest are the marked forms, possibly carrying semantic information at least in earlier forms of the language. This is further supported by the fact that in Mazandarani’s sister language, Gilaki, the verbal prefix /bə/ never co-occurs with the other less common verbal prefixes in some verb forms (e.g. past simple), but other verbal prefixes do (see Rastorgueva, 2012).

References

Borjian, H. (2009). Tabari Texts (Mutun-i Ṭabari). Tehran: Ayene-ye Miras. (In Persian)

Rastorgueva, V. S., Kerimova, A. A., Mamedzade, A. K., Pireiko, L. A., Edel’man, D. I., & Lockwood, R. M. (2012). The Gilaki Language. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Rastorgueva, V. S., Kerimova, A. A., Mamedzade, A. K., Pireiko, L. A., Edel’man, D. I., & Lockwood, R. M. (2012). The Gilaki Language. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Chicago