Documentation and Historical Dialectology of Lori (SW-Iran)

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Lori is genealogically classified as a southwest Iranian language. It is divided into a northern and a southern dialect group, both groups are further subdivided into many local dialects. Lori is spoken by ca. 3-4 Mio. people in a large area of Southwest Iran, covering (at least partly) ca. 10 Iranian provinces. Although many studies on Lori have already been published, reliable and comprehensive descriptions of most Lori dialects are still missing.On the basis of all sources available, and with the help of the documentation of three conservative and yet understudied dialects, an attempt will be made to analyze the evolution and formation of Lori in historical linguistic terms, or in other words, to lay the foundation for a historical dialectology of Lori.This includes the analysis of the separation of southwest Iranian languages from West Iranian, and the (later) separation of Lori from Southwest Iranian. For the separation of Lori (and the other SWIr. languages) from West Iranian, i.e., for its separation from Northwest Iranian, important preliminary studies exist. For the separation of Lori from Southwest Iranian, very few studies are available, the project's analytical focus will therefore be on this issue.Internal Lori developments and inner-Lori dialect distinctions also have to be analyzed, like the close relation of Lori to its northern neighbors Laki and Kurdish. This relation seems to be more recent, and has to be studied separately from the inner-southwest developments.