About the project
Language documentation and language description
The project The Language of the Arab Minority in Southern Iran is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF funded language documentation project (P 33421-G, 2020-2025), which has set itself the goal of documenting the previously undescribed Arabic varieties in southern Iran (Bushehr and Hormozgan) and analysing selected linguistic aspects. The project is committed to the principles of open source and open access .

The field research data will be used to create a large digital language corpus, which will be stored in the Endangered Languages Archive ELARarchive. In this way, the current status of local Arabic, which is endangered as the language of a minority in the Persian-speaking environment, can be recorded. Once the project is completed, the language data will be made available to the scientific community and, in some cases, to the interested public via a public web interface. Particular attention will be paid to the authenticity of the language data, which will be collected in sociolinguistic interviews and other communicative settings in collaboration with a local research team (Persian Gulf University). In addition to life stories, narratives and semi-spontaneous conversations, descriptive texts on cultural rites and traditional activities in order to cover as broad a linguistic and ethnographic spectrum as possible.
This project aims to combine approaches from general linguistics and Arabic dialectology in a meaningful way and thus contribute to bridging the existing gap between these two disciplines. In particular, we will address the following research questions:
- How can the varieties of this region be placed in the continuum of Arabic dialects in the Gulf region in terms of linguistic geography?
- Are there phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics which they share in a special way with a dialect of this region?
- How are linguistic variation, language change, language loss and preservation organised from a sociolinguistic perspective?
- What contact phenomena are evident due to the dominance of the Persian neighbouring language, especially in the areas of grammar(pattern borrowing) and prosody?
Methodologically, we are committed to the principles of documentary linguistics. The field research data collected will be processed and archived according to current standards using modern text and sound technology methods (ELAN, FLEX, PRAAT, LAMETA).
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