The Linguistic Origins of Harzan Immigrants (a Review of W. B. Henning’s Theory)

This article has sought to find an answer to the question of whether, as Walter Bruno Henning thought, Harzani is a variant of Taleshi language moved through the migration of Taleshi-speaking people to the region Harzan in Azerbaijan. Secondly, if there has been a migration to Harzan, which dialect of Taleshi language was the dialect of immigrants? In this article, 13 cases of phonological changes and  lexical differences  seen in our sources, namely the poems of Sheikh Safi al-din  of Ardabil, the language variant of Harzani, three dialects of Taleshi, and Tati dialect spoken in Khalkhal, have been studied. The phonological rules of the Proto-Iranian language are our scale to determine the differences. The statistical results obtained lead us to a qualitative analysis that if we accept the anecdote of migration, the origins of these immigrants cannot be, as Henning said, somewhere in the southeastern part of Talesh.  As an alternative, we propose here they probably belonged to the northwestern regions of Talesh.