Project
Overview
The project The Language of the Arab Minority in South Iran is a language documentation project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (P 33421-G, 2020-2024). The main objective of the project is to document hitherto undescribed Arabic varieties in South Iran (Bushehr and Hormozgan) and to investigate selected linguistic aspects of these varieties. The project is in the spirit of open source and open access. A large digital corpus will be created out of the linguistic data collected in field work, which will be archived in the Endangered Languages Archive ELAR. Thus, the current state of the endangered Arabic varieties, which are spoken by a minority within a Persian-speaking environment, will be preserved. Upon completion of the project, the linguistic data will be made available to the Scientific Community and partly also to the interested public through a public web-interface. Special attention will be given to the authenticity of the data, which will be gathered in socio-linguistic interviews and other communicative settings in cooperation with a local research team (Persian Gulf University). The corpus will not only comprise life stories, other narratives and staged conversations, but also descriptive texts dealing with cultural habits and activities as well as musical documents like traditional songs and recitatives to ensure the coverage of a range of linguistic and ethnographic data.
Goals and Methods
In this project, we aim at combining the approaches of General Linguistics and Arabic Dialectology. In so doing, we will hopefully contribute to narrowing the gap between the two disciplines.
We will specifically address the following research questions:
- How can the Arabic varieties be classified from an areal-linguistic perspective within the continuum of the Gulf dialects?
- Do they possess phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features, which particularly connect them to a dialect spoken in this region?
- What are the patterns of linguistic variation and change, of language maintenance and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective?
- What are the contact phenomena that arise due to the dominant role of Persian, specifically in the realm of grammar (pattern borrowing) and prosody?
Methodologically, we work according to the standards of documentary linguistics. The data is processed and archived using up-to-date text-technological methodologies (ELAN, FLEX, PRAAT, LAMETA).
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