The Kumzāri Dialect of Larak Island: Testing the Typological Criteria

The present paper aims at testing the typological criteria on the Kumzāri dialect of Larak Island, located in the southwest of the Persian Gulf. No linguistic description about the Kumzāri dialect of Larak Island has yet been carried out while it is an endangered Iranian dialect being spoken in a region adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula. Dialectal data in the paper are gathered in a team fieldwork, managed by the author in October 2008. To gather the data, 12 native speakers were interviewed, and 33 sessions were documented. The interviews were carried out on the basis of four types of questionnaires organized with different orientations. To sum up, among the phonetic-phonological features of Kumzāri, one may refer to the existence of alveo-lateral fricatives, velar retroflex approximants and nasal alveolar phonemes. Kumzāri and New Persian share similar syllabic structures. With regard to morpho-syntactic features, the head precedes both the genitive noun and modifier, and Kumzāri employs prepositions and uses demarcative and demonstrative suffixes. Non-finite verb forms are not employed in Kumzāri. There is an agreement between number and Iranian Languages and Dialects 1 7 Summary of Articles count nouns in this dialect while with regard to semantic criteria, gender distinction is absent. Moreover, the index of numbers and kinship terms in Kumzāri respectively show that numbers from 2 to 10 in Kumzāri resemble other Iranian dialects, whereas the word for number 1 does not. The kinship terms in this dialect show close similarity to those in the Lori dialect.