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Iran Linguistic Atlas Project (ILA): Past and Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Faryar Akhlaghi
Faryar Akhlaghi*
Affiliation:
Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Tehran (RICHT)
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Abstract

Iran Linguistic Atlas (ILA), funded by the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (RICHT), is a research project for mapping the linguistic diversity of Iran. The project is aimed at recording unified and comparable data from every spoken dialect of Iran’s rural areas and producing self-organized colored maps of this diversity using a specialized software program. Its initial phase began around the mid-1970s in the form of a joint project by the then Iranian Academy of Language and the National Geography Organization. In 2001, the documented data was handed over to the Cultural Heritage Organization, to be saved and expanded. The Iran Linguistic Atlas has now been redefined as an automatic linguistic atlas with the capability of producing self-organizing colored maps according to the operator’s choices. In this article, the ILA, its background and the state of its current phase is introduced. The nature of its data, its earlier and recent field methods, its audiotapes, digital databases and computer databases of phonetic transcriptions are described. In addition, ILA software program is presented and its capability for creating automatic colored maps is discussed thoroughly.

Keywords

DialectologyLinguistic dataQuestionnaireLinguistic DiversityLanguage DocumentationIran Linguistic AtlasDatabaseAutomatic MappingColored Map
Type
Primary sources and archival reports
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3-4: Commemorating Ehsan Yarshater Endangered Iranian Languages: Language Contact and Language Islands in Iran , August 2020 , pp. 623 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2020

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Footnotes

Iran Linguistic Atlas is a teamwork effort of all the past and present members of RICHT, especially Dr. Yadollāh Parmun—the former scientific director of the ILA—and other colleagues (faculty members of the Contemporary Languages and Dialects department), all the past and present fieldworkers (working for Farhangsāz and/or the ILA), phonetic transcribers, computer programmers, and the population of generous informants during the past forty-five years. The valuable roles of these people in establishing and promoting the project are appreciated and cannot be ignored.

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