Vocabulary Changes in the Arab, Turk, and Persian Bilingual Societies in Northeastern Iran

This study investigates borrowability of basic vocabularies such as kinship terms, body parts, and natural and weather terms in nine bilingual villages in Northeastern Iran. The surveyed villages serve as a rich bilingual area for linguistic and societal change. Speakers in these villages speak at least one or more languages including Turkish, Turkmen (Turkic), Balochi (Indo-Iranian), and Arabic (Semitic). These languages are widely spoken in the Gulf area in countries such as Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Afghanistan, and other neighboring regions. Therefore, it can be a benchmark for further similar studies. The corpus is extracted from the database of Iran Language Atlas (ILA) which include questionnaire data and interviews in different genders, ages, and educational backgrounds. The results show deep basic lexical changes in the speech communities.

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Published in: Social Change and Transformation in the Gulf Region
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7796-1_21