Galeshi or Godari? A Case Study

The narrow strip between the southern shore of the Caspian Sea and the northern slope of Alborz Mountains hosts various dialects known as Caspian. In a few studies in the field, Galshi and Godari have been introduced as either homogeneous language varieties or subbranches of Mazandarani or Gilaki language groups. The purpose of current study is to evaluate the assumption because it has not been surveyed by researchers.

In order to collect linguistics material, at the first step, shared lexical entries were extracted from the linguistic materials of Galashi and Godari dialects through the available dialectological reports. Then, the equivalents of this list of seventy-three words were collected and compiled via direct interview method from Kalagarmahalla settlement in Babol city in Mazandaran province. Then, the collected data were analyzed and compared.

Contrastive analysis of the collected linguistic materials shows that Galashi varieties are slightly different from Mazandarani in terms of vocabulary, while their phonetic processes distinguish them from other Mazandarani dialect groups. The influence of regional languages ​​is more obvious in the eastern variety of Galashi. The findings of the research show as well that in Godari dialect data, 71% of the words are similar to Mazandarani or have a slightly different pronunciation from Persian.

Although the Galesh have always been considered an independent ethnic group, the findings of the current research and its comparison with the results of previous reports, shows that Galeshi is not an autonomous language, but relies on the regional Mazandarani language as the base language. Besides the few words of Godari, now most vocabularies in Godari are borrowed from Mazandarani language with a little change in pronunciation. Nowadays, Galshi and Godari varieties both are gradually becoming assimilated with the dominant language of the region, so could be extinct.