Aspects of Iranian Linguistics

Book excerpt: Aspects of Iranian Linguistics introduces readers to recent research into various properties of a number of Iranian languages. The volume consists of twenty chapters that cover a full range of Iranian linguistics, including formal theoretical perspectives (from a syntactic and morphological point of view), typological and functional perspectives, and diachronic and areal perspectives. It also contains papers on computational linguistics and neurolinguistics, as well as the modern history of lexicography in Iran. Various Iranian languages are discussed in this volume, including Hawrami and Kermanji, two of the major dialects of Kurdish, Medival, Classical and Modern Persian, Balochi, Taleshi and Pamir. With the exception of Persian, other Iranian languages had not received much attention in the past. Thus this work, as the first volume ever published on various aspects of these languages and their linguistic properties, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a less commonly studied language family. The theoretical, descriptive, and applied approaches pursued by various authors in this volume, together with the colorful range of languages discussed, provide a unique perspective that is appealing to researchers in different domains of linguistics and language studies.