 Documenting Dari
Researching an endangered Persian
language
October 22, 2003
The Iranian
Maziar Toosarvandani and Annahita
Farudi recount how they traveled to Yazd, Iran, during the summer
of 2003 to conduct fieldwork
on the endangered language of Dari [See Saving
Gabri]. They have subsequently
founded a research organization, the Dari Language Project,
to promote
the preservation and perpetuation of the language.
We arrived in Yazd after a nine-hour, overnight
train ride from Tehran. The relatively smooth trip, most of which
we slept through
in an air conditioned car, indicated how much twentieth century
technology had changed rural Iran. It was easy to forget that
until the 1920s the lack of modern transportation methods made
regular contact between Yazd and the capital inconceivable. But
as we left the train station, the vast, empty desert plane that
met us reflected the shimmering early morning sunlight into our
sleep-weary eyes and reminded us forcibly of why we had come.
We
were retracing the path that the Zoroastrian speakers of Dari,
practitioners of Iran's ancient imperial religion, had
followed thousands of years before, after the seventh century
Arab invasion of the Persian empire. They fled to the country's
central regions in search of a haven where they could continue
practicing their inherited faith and avoid the persecution by
the Arab invaders, who sought to completely convert Iran's native
population to Islam.
While the harsh desert climate and
landscape they encountered in those desolate areas was unappealing
to the Zoroastrian émigrés, it was, more importantly,
just as unattractive to their persecutors. Consequently, the
remnants of Iran's once-majority Zoroastrian population,
are confined, after a millennium of migration, to the cities
of Yazd and Kerman, where today we find the only native speakers
of Dari.
While the number of Iranian Zoroastrians overall
(currently around 100,000) has dwindled over the past thousand
years, the number
of Dari speakers among them has decreased, and continues to decrease,
at an even more alarming rate. As such, Dari, which, as a member
of the Northwestern Iranian language family, is closely related
to languages like Gilaki, Kurdish, and Balochi, less closely
to Persian, and distantly to the European languages, is today
the mother language of only a small portion of Iran's Zoroastrian
population, numbering no more than 8,000 to 15,000 people. Because
it has so few speakers, Dari is spoken in increasingly confined
spheres of usage, and shows signs of converging with Farsi. Thus
Dari is considered
to be highly endangered.
We are particularly concerned with Dari
since its endangered status is exacerbated by the fact it has
not been studied adequately. While a selection of grammatical
sketches exists, they are either cursory or so old that the resources
are inadequate to the task of writing a comprehensive grammar
of the language. It is the frightening reality that, if the last
speaker were to die today and Dari were to cease to exist, we
would know virtually nothing about the language.
We began planning
a one-month linguistic fieldwork project last fall, a project
that would take place in Iran and would have
the intent of documenting and analyzing
Dari in its native environment.
In order to secure financial backing for our
project, without which the entire endeavor would have been impossible, we sent
a proposal detailing our intention to twelve non-profit Iranian and Zoroastrian
cultural organizations. The initial responses to our project were overwhelmingly
positive, but monetary contributions were slow to come.
Our hopes of realizing
our plans were further dampened by the political uncertainty in the Middle
East, but instead of abandoning them, we redoubled our fund-raising
efforts, intensifying
correspondence with scholars, individuals, and organizations, and submitting
our proposal to online agencies. Our perseverance proved worthwhile and by
the time of our scheduled departure, we had secured enough
contributions to cover
the costs of our travel expenses as well as the purchase of the necessary
recording equipment.
The month of July we spent living and working
in Qasemabad, a Zoroastrian village within the city of Yazd.
We met with our linguistic consultants,
native speakers
of Dari, every day, eliciting from them words and phrases and occasionally
stories, which we recorded electronically. Afterwards, we transcribed the
speech data
manually and began preliminary analysis, often continuing far into the
night.
We found an intriguing diversity in the formal
properties of Dari's pronoun
system despite an underlying unity of organization, and a differential
treatment of subjects depending on whether the sentences in which
they appear are transitive
or intransitive. We are currently surveying the relevant literature to
determine which features of Dari may tell us more about language
generally.
Our stay
in Qasemabad encompassed more than purely linguistic pursuits alone,
however. We
made a strong effort to participate actively in the religious and social
life of the Zoroastrian community in Yazd. We integrated ourselves into
the daily
life of the villagers and took advantage of many unique opportunities
to attend various religious ceremonies and cultural events.
While
our research this summer was highly successful considering the
limited amount of time we had, it only scratched the surface of Dari's
structure.
If nothing else, we have returned from Yazd with a realization of how
much remains to be learned. We were also struck by the dire situation
that the
Dari language
faces and by how little time is left to work with the last few elderly
speakers of some dialects.
The Mohammadabad dialect, for example, possesses
only a
few elderly speakers, all of whom reside in Tehran. This powerful realization
has
inspired us to expand the scope of our research: what began as a month-long
fieldwork trip will now continue through a research organization that
we have founded under
the name of the Dari Language Project. The Project is dedicated to
preserving the Dari language through study of its linguistic
structure and patterns.
Our work this summer took the first step towards
a complete understanding of the
language through a study of the Qasemabad dialect within the context
of current linguistic theory. We plan to return during the summer
of 2004
to continue
our research on Qasemabad Dari, but also to expand the study to include
examination of another of Dari's most threatened varieties.
By investigating
the two
varieties' grammars concurrently, we hope to make valid cross-dialectical
comparisons as well as make further headway in analyzing the language's
grammar. We will soon begin a new fundraising campaign to raise
support for the
Dari Language's Project's fieldwork effort next summer and to ensure
its long-term success.
Though the outlook for Dari's future is
grim today, much hope remains. It is a well-attested linguistic
fact that attitudes towards language
are of the greatest importance in determining the language's chances
of revival
or continued vitality in the face of imminent death.
In spite of
the statistics predicting the demise of the Dari language, we
believe that
Dari's future
is not hopeless, especially when we consider that language is
intimately related
to the culture and society of its speakers. For example, many
argue that Dari was a local dialect that was purposely adopted
by the
Zoroastrians as an additional
means of distinguishing themselves from their Muslim persecutors.
Though this remains an unsupported claim, it seems much more
likely than the
alternate argument, that Dari was consciously "invented" by
its speakers in order to prevent outsiders from understanding
it.
Whether or not this latter view has any
basis in reality or not, the fact that it is such a prevalent
notion among both non-speakers and speakers is indicative of,
what seems
to us, Dari speakers' general
interest in and awareness of their language. The Dari speakers
we encountered were not only highly conscious of their language's
diversity and variation
but they also seemed to derive the utmost enjoyment from presenting
this diversity to us in the form of words and turns-of-phrase
especially different from their
own speech.
While it would be preposterous to suggest that
Dari is not highly threatened today, showing as it does all the
typical
signs of
imminent death,
the beauty of language, like culture, is that it is a dynamic,
living system,
as capable
of progressing in one direction as it is in another, given
the appropriate stimuli.
Indeed, the fact that, in spite
of their
vastly diminished
numbers, the Zoroastrians
have managed to preserve as much of their traditional culture
as they have is quite remarkable. Their success is no doubt
the result
of the
strength
of their
conviction that what they are preserving is an extremely
valuable system, worthy of protection even in the face of
difficulty. As linguists committed
to the
preservation of the Dari language, our fondest desire
is therefore
to convince Dari's
speakers, the Zoroastrians of Iran, that their language
is a complex and beautiful system equally worthy of protection. Authors
Maziar Toosarvandani was graduated from the University of Virginia
in 2003 with a B.S. in linguistics and biology. He has
been accepted into the theoretical
linguistics Ph.D. program at University of California at Berkeley and will
attend beginning in the fall of 2004. He is currently teaching
English in France.
Annahita Farudi was graduated from the University
of Virginia in 2003 with a B.A. in linguistics and comparative
literature. She currently attends the University
of Oxford in Oxford, England where she is working towards a M.Phil. in theoretical
linguistics.
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Documenting Dari