Dialect Leveling

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some factors accelerating dialect leveling among Persian dialects. The second part of the paper presents some empirical evidence for the change, based on the data collected from 3 Persian dialects, namely: Birjandi, Neyshaboori, and Yazdi. Three spoken language sample corpora from two age cohort groups in each speech community were collected. Having transcribed the data, the researchers juxtaposed the phonological, morphological, and syntactic conventions of the two groups of each speech community for further in-depth analysis. Comparing the speech samples of the two age cohorts in each corpus revealed significant movements towards standard dialect. However, the quality and quantity of the observed movements did not appear to be the same across the dialects in question.

In this article, the plural marker in the Mahshahri dialect is examined. Mahshahri is the native language of the people of Bandar-e Mahshahr. This dialect has close similarities with other Iranian language varieties spoken in southern Iran, particularly those of other southern cities of Khuzestan Province, and Iranian language varieties of Bushehr, Fars and Kohkiluye and Boyr-Ahmad provinces. From a methodological point of view, this research is descriptive and analytical. The research data were mainly obtained through a questionnaire and by examining the text of a twenty-minute continuous speech from the Mahshahri dialect. The investigations carried out in this article show that the plural marker of Mahshahri is /-æl/, which, based on the phonetic environment of the base to which it is added, can have other allomorphic manifestations as well. The conducted studies also indicate that there are variations in the use of the plural marker in the Mahshahri dialect. These variations, in many cases, align with the replacement of the marker with its standard Persian counterparts. Therefore, the variations that can be seen in the use of the plural marker of Mahshahri can be considered in line with other current changes that are underway in the direction of leveling the dialect with standard Persian in Iran.