Аннотация:This paper is the result of fieldwork in 2013-2014 in Northern provinces along the south-ern Caspian coastline (Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan; Golestan was separated from Ma-zandaran in 1997). All local minority languages are in various stages of endangerment, and some of these regional linguemes put pressure on the others. Generally speaking they are a product of migration, cross-cultural processes, as well as attitudes towards preservation of local languages.
Mazanderani and Gilaki are two closely related North-Western Caspian Iranian languages with about 2.5 and 3 million speakers, respectively. Each of them is divided into several dia-lects. In both varieties, the speech of plainsmen is opposed to the mountaineers, who call their vernacular Galeshi. The Mazanderani language - that was historically called Tabari – also in-corporates dialects of Babol, Sari, Amol; Shamerzad; Gorgan, Ziyarat, Nasrabad, Chashme sorkh; Velatru village (Velayat-e Rud) and others. The inhabitants of Shamerzad do not con-sider their local language to be a kind of Mazanderani. The inhabitants of Velatru (Velayat-e Rud) call their local language Gilaki, though they converse with Mazanderani speakers with-out any difficulty. Gilaki is also split into dialects of bigger settlements (such as Astara, Ban-dar Enzeli, Rasht, Lahijan, Langerud, Rudbar, etc) separated by the river Sefid Rud into western and eastern branch. Additionally, there are a number of intermediate speech varieties of Kelardasht (in Chalus County), and Tonekabon (County); administratively both are includ-ed in the territory of Mazandaran province.
In addition to other similar features, both languages are characterized by:
1. Strong influence of Persian at all levels (phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary).
2. Considerable number of Russian borrowings (a higher number in vocabulary, and more frequent in usage, than in modern Persian).
3. Reverse Status construction (in terms of the sequence of elements), i.e. (ezāfe construc-tion), which unlike Persian begins with a marked dependent determiner followed by the head noun.
4. Primarily tonal word stress.
In order to analyse the acoustic properties of stress, the speech of native speakers (3 Ma-zanderani and 4 Gilaki) was recorded. Multivariate ANOVA analysis showed that the defin-ing feature of the stressed syllables in both languages is pitch (p<0.001). Mazanderani stress has no other significant factors, while in Gilaki intensity (p=0.006) and complex 3D-factor (pitch-intensity-duration) (p=0.034) are also very important. Thus, the stress in Gilaki is com-plex: tonal-dynamic. The main reason for the common basis of the stress (pitch) could be that the speakers of both languages are bilingual, and Persian, being common for them, has tonal stress.
In general, Mazanderani and Gilaki speakers can understand each other, though customar-ily they communicate in Persian. From a sociolinguistic point of view, Mazanderani is not treated as a prestigious language. Unacquainted people in the streets usually address each other in Persian and change to their local language only after they get acquainted. For in-stance, a local passer-by would buy a newspaper from a local newspaper seller, using Persian. Even a local woman would discuss her divorce suit with a local attorney exclusively in Per-sian. Parents, especially in rural communities, encourage their children to speak Persian al-ways, in order to make their speech undistinguishable from that of residents in the capital. They do this so that their children can seek a better career in Tehran. This striving for a better life and higher social status is one of the reasons why the social basis for Caspian languages is shrinking.
We have detected some discrepancies with the generally accepted description of Ma-zanderani, especially in the field of phonetics. Although nowadays Mazanderani has no writ-ten presence, some books in Arabic script with Latin transcription (dictionaries, collections of proverbs and sayings, legends and narratives) can be found. The actual pronunciation and phonemic composition of some words differ, first, from their presentation in traditional litera-ture, and, secondly, from the manner linguistically educated native speakers write themselves.
Well-educated Gilaki speakers use Persian alphabet to write books and articles. A well-known Gilaki writer M.P. Jektaji publishes the literary journal Gilavā. Here, a special super-script letter (7) is used to denote the vowel [ə] (ezafe) in the texts. Similarly, some slight vari-ations are apparent when we compare the transcription of the Mazandarani magazine Barfo-rush with that of the two Mazandarani dictionaries of proverbs (1996; 1990). These demon-strate that the written expression is not uniformly consistent.
A corpus of texts on these speech varieties was compiled, and can be accessed on the site of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The database is given for these language varieties in audio- and written transcription (in Iranian and IPA variants), Rus-sian translation and glossing. For the Gilaki language, we also provide the audio recording of texts from V.S. Rastorgueva, A.A. Kerimova, A.K. Mamedzade, L.A. Pireyko, D.I. Edel-man, Gilaki Language (1971). Comparing the speech of our language consultants with this book, we have found out that the vocalism in the book tends towards Tajiki. For instance, there is written the expression Či kuni? “What are you doing?” (text 1). Our consultants pro-nounce it Če koni? In many other texts we see the same kind of substitution (e↔i, o↔u). Thus, the phonetic description of Gilaki requires further work and refining. For the Mazanda-rani language, we offer recordings of the Mazandarani proverbs and parables (Tayar Yazdan-Panah-Lamuki, Dictionary of Mazandarani proverbs, 1996; Mostafa Ansari, Dictionary of Mazandarani proverbs, 1990), as well as some narratives on the lifestyle history and cultural traditions of the people taken during our fieldwork.
