The philological and historical linguistic study of the medieval Iranian Fahlawī and Āẕarī poetry (12-16 cent. CE)

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A rich diversity of written literary traditions in various dialects is known to have existed in medieval Iran from the 10th century CE onwards. In the shadow of the prestigious Classical Persian literature, these traditions showed a great vitality over many centuries, e.g. Tabari (10-17 cent.) in Māzandarān, or the Old Shirazi (13-16 cent.), in which also the Shirazi poets Saʿdī and Ḥāfeẓ wrote some verses. Another important tradition is that of the Fahlawīyāt poetry (12-16 cent.), composed in the Fahlawī language, that blossomed in a large area called "Fahla", reaching from West Iran (Hamadān) to Central Iran (Isfahan) and up to North West Iran (Tabrīz). This tradition likely goes back to pre-Islamic epic and lyric traditions that were called "Pahlawī", and that were developed to a supra-regional standard literature in the course of time. Geographically, the Fahla region overlaps with the ancient region of Azarbaijan, where Āẕarī was used as a spoken and literary language during the same time. Since the Fahlawī and Āẕarī literary traditions influenced each other, especially in their late stages, they should be studied together. As it is true for most pre-modern dialectal Iranian literary traditions, the Fahlawī and Āẕarī poetry have been neglected by Iranian, and even more by international scholarship so far. There is a number of scattered small publications, mostly on single texts, most of them written in Persian. The number of known Fahlawī and Āẕarī manuscripts has increased considerably in the last 20 years, and contains well over verses 700 now (over 600 of which are in Fahlawī). On the basis of this corpus, it is possible to give a new account and analysis of both literary traditions. All the known verses will be edited, translated into English, and commented philologically; the linguistic form of both subcorpora will be described and analyzed in terms of historical dialectology. Such a work can make accessible an almost extinct, important mediaeval poetic tradition, and will be a long-awaited desideratum of historical West Iranian dialectology. The description and analysis of both linguistic forms will help understand better the pre-history of those modern Iranian languages that are related to Fahlawī and Āẕarī, like the Central Iranian dialects (~ Fahlawī), or Tātī and Tālešī (~ Āẕarī). This may also serve to fill a gap in our understanding of the development of West Iranian from Middle Persian and Parthian up to contemporary languages and dialects.