The Tati language
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Group |
Iranian (with Kurdish, Talysh etc.), Southwest Iranian (with Persian, Tadjik etc.) |
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Geography |
Tati is spoken within a few isolated districts in Azerbaijan and in Dagestan (Russia), and also in the towns of Nalchik and Mozdok (Russia). The total amount of Tati people makes an approximate of 20,000 people. The southern variety of Tati is spoken in north-western Iran. There, it has no written tradition. |
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History |
Of the two Iranian languages of the Caucasus, Tati came here from the south. It had no written documents until the 20s of the 20th century when a Latin-based script was created for it (changed for Cyrillic in 1938). Today there is a thriving literature in Russia and Azerbaijan written in Tati. |
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Phonetics |
Unlike all other Western Iranian languages, Tati has got an interesting phonetic feature called the rhotacism: the Iranian d turns into r after a vowel. Among other phonetic traits of the language we can note the preserved initial v (for which the other Iranian languages have b). |
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Nominal Morphology |
Tati does not know enclytic pronouns, its secondary verbal forms cannot be conjugated. The southern dialect was restructured somehow and became morphologically and sintactically much like Azerbaijani. This Azerbaijani influence is the main distinguishing feature of Tati which makes it different from other Iranian tongues. |
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Lexicon |
A lot of Azerbaijani and Caucasian borrowings |
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Writing |
Cyrillic alphabet (Azerbaijan, Russia), no writing (Iran) |
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Close Contacts |
Persian; the Caucasian and Turkish languages (first of all Azerbaijani). |