Khargi language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Khargi | |
|---|---|
| ئِێسْنِير | |
| Native to | Iran |
| Region | Kharg Island |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
Khargi is a Southwestern Iranian language spoken on the Iranian island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf.[1]
Khargi is related to the Iranian languages of Fars province and those along the littoral areas down to the Strait of Hormuz.[1] The language was first documented in the late 1950s by the publicist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who reported in his ethnography that out of the 120 resident households who then inhabited the island, most had migrated from the coastal areas of Tangestan with only a minority of the population being locals.[2] The native speakers of Khargi at the time characterized the language as a dialect close to that of Tangestan and Bushehr.[2]
Status
Within the next few decades, as Kharg transformed from an isolated rural society into a petroleum export hub, large-scale social and demographic changes took place, with Persian becoming the dominant language in all spheres of life.[2] Fieldwork on Kharg by the linguist Habib Borjian in 2016 showed that Khargi was still spoken "by as few as a dozen families, and even therein it was not properly transmitted to the next generation".[2] Borjian adds that the "rest of the local population of the island was either the indigenous Khargis who had lost the native language or the immigrants from nearby littoral settlements who spoke their own kindred dialects".[2] Worried about its extinction, the local Khargi speakers however have published new materials on the Khargi language, including poetry and proverbs.[2]