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This handbook presents a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of phonetic and phonological research on Iranian languages and dialects. Iranian languages spoken by tens of millions across a wide geographical area extending from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, and diaspora communities exhibit considerable variation in phonetic detail and phonological structure. Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, this handbook provides original empirical findings, theoretical insights, and experimental results that explore various aspects of sound systems of Iranian languages and dialects. Until now, much of the scholarly work on Iranian languages has focused on historical and comparative linguistics of Persian, or the pedagogical aspects of mainly Persian. This handbook takes as its central focus the systematic study of phonological processes and sound systems across a wide range of Iranian languages in order to highlight the unexplored phonetic and phonological details of contemporary Iranian languages. The book fills that critical gap, offering a thematic and typologically informed approach. The handbook also responds to a growing demand for interdisciplinary work. Contributions bridge traditional phonological theory with applied domains such as first / second language acquisition, speech therapy, and poetic meter. It serves multiple audiences that include theoretical linguists, speech clinicians, language educators, and typologists interested in the sound systems of Iranian languages and dialects. In doing so, this book stimulates future research, promotes cross-linguistic comparison, and fosters greater attention to the sound systems of Iranian languages in academic, clinical, and educational settings.
List of contents
Consonantal systems and processes.- Vowel systems and processes.- Rhythm, intonation, prosody, and stress.- Metrical systems.-Sound systems of lesser-described Iranian dialects.
About the author
Dr. Reza Falahati is a lecturer of phonetics and phonology at Vrije University and Leiden University. He also has the experience of teaching academic English writing and reading courses in the Netherlands, Canada, and Iran. The results of his research have been presented in conferences and published in volumes by the
Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, and various journals such as
ESP across Cultures and
Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association. His academic background includes a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa and a Master’s in Linguistics from the University of Victoria and his second Master's in Education with a focus on Teaching English as a Foreign Language from the University of Tehran.
Dr. Zahra Ghane is a linguist whose research focuses on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, and the syntax–pragmatics interface, with a particular emphasis on Persian. Her work explores the grammaticalization of discourse markers and argument realization, drawing on corpus-based methods to examine how meaning is shaped through language use and structure.
She has collaborated on international and interdisciplinary projects, including AI-assisted studies on Persian and English in Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Her publications appear with Springer, Corpora, and Penn State University Press, among others. Dr. Ghane is the author of a book on English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the translator of five academic volumes in linguistics and cultural studies, and the co-editor of New Frontiers in Corpus-Based Studies of Persian. She received her PhD with honors from the University of Isfahan and has more than a decade of experience teaching discourse and translation studies at the university level.
Summary
This handbook brings together current research on the phonetics and phonology of the Modern Iranian languages to provide a comprehensive overview of the main phonetic and phonological phenomena in these languages. These two fields, like other areas of linguistics, have undergone rapid advances in the past decade due to developments in experimental methods and phonological models. These changes render Iranian languages and their varieties a promising area of research which can make a significant contribution to general linguistic knowledge, and advance our understanding of cross-linguistic variation. The spread of Iranian language family is wide ranging, from Central Turkey in the west to the Uygur region of China in the east. In the North, it includes Ossetic and Yaghnobi, while in the South it includes languages such as Kumzari spoken in part of Oman. Despite the wide range of Iranian languages, only four of these languages are the official languages of the country in whichthey are spoken: Persian, Dari, Tajik, and Pashto. As a result, many Iranian languages have not been the prime goal of organizations/agencies which try to document and preserve languages. This handbook offers readers a state-of-the-art report of research in the field with a special emphasis on these less-studied Iranian languages and varieties. Relevant to linguists working in phonetics, both in Iranian and other languages, this book provides an overview of cutting edge and current linguistic knowledge.
