« The Tāti Dialect of Kalāsur », in : Dieter Weber, ed., Languages of Iran: Past and Present. Iranian Studies in memoriam David Neil MacKenzie. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2005, pp. 269-283. (Iranica 8)

Ehsan Yarshater is the first linguist who has introduced and described the “Tāti-Tāleshi” groups of Iranian languages. His SOAS PhD dissertation, « The Tāti Dialect Spoken to the South of Qazvin » (1960), which was revised and published later on as A Grammar of Southern Tāti Dialects is still a major reference in the study of this dialect family. Yarshater’s studies on the Southern Tāti and Tāleshi covers a wide area, which includes Tāleshi-speaking districts on the West Caspian coast, Khalkh..

Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge Curzon, 2005, 373 p.

This book is partly based on the contributions to a conference convened at Uppsala University in 2001, named Areas of Iranian-Semitic-Turkic Convergence: Linguistic Contact in Western and Central Asia in the Past and Present. The book is composed of four parts (Iranian Languages, Semitic Languages, Turkic Languages, and other Perspectives) with 25 papers, of which five papers concern Iranian languages (cf. c.r. n° 32, 39, 40, 41, 42)

« Central Asian Arabic: The Irano-Arabic Dynamics of a new Perfect », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge Curzon, 2005, pp. 111-123.

The northernmost dialect of Arabic is Central Asian Arabic, spoken in a few villages in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This dialect has been highly affected by the Iranian languages (mainly Tajiki) with respect to the verb system. In this paper, it is shown that the Central Asian Arabic may be distinguished from other Arabic dialects with respect to a perfect form referred to as the “new perfect”. The new fully inflected perfect developed is marked for all persons and gender, and it..

« Lexical Areas and Semantic Fields of Arabic Loanwords in Persian and Beyond », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge Curzon, 2005, pp. 97-109.

This paper discusses the issue of the enormous lexicon of Arabic borrowings shared among Persian, Turkish and what he refers to as the Indic languages of the central Islamic oicumene. Before this, in his (1991) book entitled Form and Meaning in Persian Vocabulary: The Arabic Feminine Ending, the writer had described a mechanism for delineating the boundaries of the geocultural area within which Persian functioned as the inductor and distributor of Arabic vocabulary, and based upon that work, ..

« Semitic in Iranian: Written, Read and spoken Language », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge Curzon, 2005, pp. 65-77.

This paper deals with the effects and the influence of Semitic languages on the Iranian ones. Utas studies such relationships with respect to Old Persian, Middle Persian and New Persian, where he goes through the relations of Aramaic with first two, and Arabic with the last one

« Iranian as Buffer Zone between the Universal Typologies of Turkic and Semitic », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge Curzon, 2005, pp. 35-63.

This is one of the most informative papers in the field of the typology of the Iranian languages. Within the study of implicational syntactic universals, knowing the placement of the direct object and the adposition (OV/PO vs. VO/PR, where O, V, PR, and PO stand for direct object, verb, preposition and postposition respectively), is believed to be sufficient for predicting the other syntactic features of a language, and it can be agreed upon for at least 50% of the languages with those featur..

« The Glottal Plosive: A Phoneme in Spoken Modern Persian or not? », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge-Curzon, 2005, pp. 79-96.

In this paper, Carina Jahani addresses a problematic issue in the phonology of Persian, the case of glottal plosive (hamze), and aims to see if the glottal plosive has the chance to remain on the phonemic chart of spoken Persian. This research is based on her fieldwork, and the phonological environment of the glottal plosive, along with structural, semantic, situational, and speaker-related factors have been taken into account. The findings show that the glottal plosive does exist as a phonem..

Vafsi Folk Tales. Wiesbaden, Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004, 288 p., biblio., no index.

Vafsi refers to the language of people of four villages in west central Iran: Vafs, Chehreqân, Gurchân and Fark in Markazi province, and is regarded as a north-western Iranian language. It shares similarities with Ashtiyani, Amore'i and Tafreshi dialects, and has also been influenced by Taleshi and some central Iranian dialects. Actually, it is believed that Vafsi is a mixture of Tati and the Iranian central dialects, and due to the special geographic situation of Vafs, it has kept many of it..