A Linguistic Atlas for Iran’s Languages

Dr. Erik Anonby & Dr. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Carleton University, Universität Bamberg & Shahr-e Kord University, Canada & Iran

There have been a number of important efforts to map out the languages of Iran, but until now no language atlas, or even a comprehensive and detailed country-level language map, has been produced. One of the recent projects which aims to fill this gap in the literature is the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (http://iranatlas.net/), an international collaborative effort involving partners in Iran and internationally. As outlined in earlier work (Anonby 2015), the Atlas has been designed with the following key features: use of the open-source, open-access Nunaliit Atlas Framework (http://nunaliit.org/); developed by an international team of volunteer scholars and students; includes each of Iran’s some 60,000 cities and villages; capable of remote contributions and moderation of input by Atlas editors; brings together existing publications and new data; development and implementation of questionnaires for sociolinguistic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic research; references sources for all data, whether published work, collaborator field notes or user contributions; and allows for comparison of language identification maps with language data maps. The eventual and ultimate goal of our research is to enable production of a comprehensive, detailed and reliable online Atlas showing the distribution of languages and linguistic structures for all of Iran.

The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.LLLD.IR), 2-3 February 2017, Iran-Ahwaz.


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