Introduction
Turkic speakers in Iran make up approximately a quarter of Iran’s population, a rather large minority. Most of these varieties belong to the Oghuzic branch of Turkic.Footnote 1 Historically, their speakers are descended from Seljuk Oghuz tribes which, after establishing a state in the Syr-Darya, proceeded west, conquering first Khorasan and later Anatolia.Footnote 2 Gerhard Doerfer classified Oghuzic varieties of Iran into four different sub-branches:
Central Oghuz or Azerbaijanian, encompassing the varieties spoken in the provinces of East and West Azerbaijan and Ardabil as well as three enclaves in Khorasan (Galūgāh, Loṭf-ābād and Daragaz);
South Oghuz represented by Qašqā’ī and related dialects, also including Zanjān and Qazvīn varieties in the northeast;
East Oghuz or Khorasan Turkic;
North Oghuz or Turkmen, i.e. the variety of Gonbad-e Qābūs in Golestān province.Footnote 3
Speakers of Central, South and East Oghuz generally identify themselves as Turk/Tork and their language as Turkī/Torkī. The only non-Oghuzic Turkic language of Iran is Khalaj, forming an independent Turkic language group, often referred to as Arghu. Historically, Khalaj people might descend from non-Oghuzic Arghu tribes—mentioned by Maḥmūd al-Kāšġarī’s encyclopedic compendium Dīvānu Luġāti’t-Turk—which presumably came to Iran after the thirteenth century Mongolian invasion.Footnote 4 Presently, the number of Khalaj speakers approximately amounts to 42,100, distributed over several villages in the Markazī province across an area stretching from Qom, to Aštiyān and Tafreš.Footnote 5
Turkī Classificatory Features
Turkī varieties are rather close to each other. They are mutually intelligible and share a common set of so-called Azerbaijani-style features. As a matter of fact, Central and South Oghuzic, Azerbaijani and its dialects, as well as varieties spoken in East Anatolia and northern Iraq form a linguistic area within Oghuzic.Footnote 6
As for the sound system, such features include the occurrence of long consonants in intervocalic position, e.g. äkki “two,” eššäk “donkey,” ottuz “thirty,” the opposition between ä and e in first syllable, e.g. äl “hand” vs. el “land,” instability of y-, e.g. ilan “snake” and üz “face” (cf. Azerbaijani ilan and üz, but Turkish yılan and yüz), vowel rounding in the neighborhood of labials, e.g. böyük “big,”Footnote 7 and assimilations to a following nasal: min “thousand,” men “I.” Furthermore, all Azerbaijanian varieties display heavy palatalization of velar stops, particularly in Central Oghuz, where initial and medial velar stops developed into č and ǰ, respectively.Footnote 8
On the morphological level, typical Azerbaijanian features include the opposition between a focal present -Ur and a non-focal present -Ar, the preservation of a complete optative paradigm, the occurrence of the instrumental suffix -(I)nAn, e.g. mašinnan “by car,” and the terminative -AǰAn, e.g. ävänčä, “till home.”Footnote 9
As for the lexicon, besides displaying a huge and an ever-expanding number of Persian lexical copies, Iran-Oghuzic varieties share with Azerbaijanian and Anatolian dialects a specific set of Mongolic elements representing Mongol Ilkhanid heritage, e.g. yeke “big,” daruγa and darγa “night-patrol, sentinel, guard.”Footnote 10
Khalaj
Khalaj displays several highly interesting features, some of which distinguish it from the rest of Turkic. As for the sound-system, Khalaj preserves proto-Turkic long vowels, e.g. va:r “existing” vs. var- “to go.” Long vowels often have a diphtongized character, e.g. bi:eš ∼ be:š “five.” Another noteworthy feature is the continuation of Proto Turkic *p- as h-, e.g. hat “horse.”Footnote 11 Common Turkic -δ-and -δ have developed in Khalaj into -d- and -d, e.g. hadaq “foot” and bo:d “figure, body.”Footnote 12 In stems and suffixes, Khalaj preserves Common Turkic G- and -G, e.g. -GA (intentional suffix) vs. Oghuzic -(y)A (optative suffix); -lUγ (adjectival suffix), e.g. hatlïγ ∼ hatluγ “horseman.”Footnote 13
Khalaj peculiar morphological features include the occurrence of the suffix -DA as an ablative marker, continuing thus a feature attested in Runic Turkic (eighth century), and -čA as a locational marker, otherwise functioning as an equative suffix in Turkic.Footnote 14 Khalaj also holds a special position within Turkic with respect to imperative forms. Affirmative imperative forms ultimately go back to postverbial constructions formed by the lexical verb augmented by a converbial suffix followed by an auxiliary verb.Footnote 15 For instance Khalaj ye:pi “eat!” can be traced back to ye:- “to eat” augmented by the converbial suffix -(X)p followed by the auxiliary verb ïδ- “to send.” On the other hand, negative imperatives follow Turkic patterns, i.e. are formed adding the negative suffix -mA to the verbal stem, e.g. ye:me “don’t eat.”Footnote 16
On the lexical level, Khalaj displays several archaic lexemes, e.g. baluq “village,” va:- “to close,” hürün ∼ hirin “white.”Footnote 17 Nevertheless, Khalaj has also intensively copied from adjacent Iranian varieties. Particularly interesting in this respect are Tatic elements.Footnote 18 Moreover, due to proximity to the turkī-speaking area, Khalaj has undergone influence from Oghuzic as well, especially the speech of male Khalaj.Footnote 19
Language Contact with Iranian: Some ExamplesFootnote 20
The contact with Iranian has a long history and is best exemplified by a verse of Maḥmūd al-Kāšġarī, well-known in Turcological studies:
Speakers of Turkic came into contact with Iranian speakers long before migrating to present-day Iran. As a matter of fact, it was in Central Asia, in Transoxiana that the Seljuk Turks embraced Islam. It goes without saying that the contact situation became more intense after reaching present Iranian territories.
Much has been written on the influence of Persian on the Turkic languages of Iran, especially Oghuzic, and on the typological convergence between them and Persian.Footnote 22 Contact-induced features include: delabialization, breaking of intrasyllabic synharmonism, copying of Persian-bound morphemes, e.g. the izāfe-marker, the comparative suffix -tar, replacing Turkic -rAk, and the marker of indefiniteness -i. On the syntactic level, the intensive copying of combinational patterns has led to the dominance of imitated postpositive subordinate clauses,Footnote 23 thus reducing the use of Turkic particles and converbs.
In this contribution, I will confine myself to some observations on the anaphoric pronominal stem bilä-, necessity constructions and the multifunctionality of ki/ke, providing new data on Khalaj and offering some insights for further research.
The Anaphoric Pronominal Stem bilä-
Several Iran-Turkic varieties display the intriguing anaphoric pronoun bilä-, occurring for all singular and plural pronouns. Functionally, as analyzed by Christiane Bulut,Footnote 24bilä- never occurs in the nominative and it cannot combine with genitive suffixes to form possessive pronouns. Bilä- can only follow dative, accusative, ablative and instrumental suffixes, as well as the postposition ičin “for.” Some examples are:Footnote 25
Bilä- occurs in Khalaj as well. Gerhard Doerfer argued that it may represent a copy from neighboring Oghuzic varieties.Footnote 29 Some examples are:
There are close structural correspondences between Turkic and Persian in this respect, as shown by Sohrab Dolatkhah:Footnote 33
Apparently, cognates of bilä- do not occur in Turkmen varieties of Golestān province and in Khorasan Turkic. They are, however, documented in Afshar varieties in Afghanistan.Footnote 34 Moreover, cognates of bilä- occur in Anatolian dialects as well as in Old Ottoman and in seventeenth century Iran-Turkic materials from Isfahan.Footnote 35 As for its origin, bilä- may represent a grammaticalization of the adverb belä “so.”Footnote 36
Necessity
To express necessity, Oghuzic varieties in Iran employ a periphrastic construction where a nominal sentence with Turkic gäräk “necessary, necessity” (or its synonym lāzïm) is followed by a subordinate clause whose finite verb is either in the optative or voluntative/imperative, corresponding thus to the Iranian construction bāyad + subjunctive. See the example below from the Orumiyeh variety:
The Khalaj necessitative construction reveals a deeper, and possibly older, contact with Iranian. See the examples below:
The intentional suffix -GA, structurally corresponding to the Oghuzic optative, is added to the imperative stem, and not like other suffixes to the bare verbal stem. The fact that in Persian both the subjunctive and the imperative are formed from the present stem of verbs may have triggered the emergence of this peculiar Khalaj feature.
On the other hand, negative forms, as expected since Khalaj negative imperatives follow Turkic patterns, are formed from the bare verbal stem, e.g. käl-mä-gä-m (come-neg-int-1sg).Footnote 40
Finally, it should also be noted that contracted forms often occur in allegro speech tempo:
E:t-γä-m and yovom occurring in the examples above are clearly contractions of e:t-i-γä-m (to do-imp-int-1sg) and yova-γa-m (to go.imp-int-1sg), respectively.
Multifunctionality of ke/ki
Another interesting case of convergence between Iran-Turkic and Persian/Iranian is represented by the multifunctionality of ke/ki. Much has been written on ki as a subordinative conjunction introducing a wide range of dependent clauses. It shall suffice to quote here three examples with the subordinator ki occurring in pre-verbal position of temporal clauses. This syntactic pattern is shared by several other languages in Iran.Footnote 43
These constructions occur in Khalaj as well:
Even though Doerfer did not explicitly analyze this construction, examples are found in his Khalaj materials:
To conclude, I wish to offer some preliminary notes on two neglected functions of ki/ke occurring in Iran-Turkic varieties and displaying Persian parallels. Ki/ke occurs extremely frequently as an emphatic and focus particle, always following the focused/emphasized element; see the selected examples below:
Note that such uses of ki are very frequent in spoken Azerbaijani too.Footnote 50
Lastly, ki/ke often occurs as an utterance-final particle underlying the obvious in exclamatory sentences and adding some rhetorical nuances in questions. See the examples below.
Close correspondences are found in both Azerbaijani and Turkish:
As for the origin of the Turkish utterance final rhetorical particle ki, it has been argued that it is possibly related to Old Turkic ärki, an epistemic and modal particle occurring sentence-finally, and displaying cognates in Sayan Turkic languages.Footnote 60 If this were true, then could Persian ke occurring in the final position of interrogative and exclamatory sentences have been inspired by Turkic?
Text Sample: A Khalaj Cooking Recipe
I wish to include in the present contribution a glossed Khalaj text I recorded in 2018 in the village of Bahārestān. The speaker is Mrs. Sakine Arabgol, aged sixty-two, a native speaker of Khalaj. She explains how to prepare a special Khalaj soup called sü:trāzi. The local Persian name of this dish is Talkhanašīr.
How to prepare sü:trāzi:
