RESEARCH INTO KHORASAN ARABIC: A PRELIMINARY REPORT AND TEXTS FROM ARABKHANE AND KHALAF
RESEARCH INTO KHORASAN ARABIC: A PRELIMINARY REPORT AND TEXTS FROM ARABKHANE AND KHALAF

Summary/Abstract: My PhD thesis project aims to describe the Bedouin-type Arabic dialect of Arabkhane in Iran‘s South Khorasan Province. For that purpose, I enrolled as a visiting researcher at Tehran‘s Allameh Tabataba‘i University in late summer of 2019. Khorasan Arabic‘s closest affiliates are the dialects of the Arabic speaking exclaves of Afghanistan (Mazar-e Sharif, Balkh, Jowzjan) and the varieties of the Uzbekistan group(Bukhara, Qashqadarya). Together they constitute the peripheral branch of so-called Central Asian Arabic. Unlike the dialects of Uzbekistan Arabic which are fairly well documented, we have only little knowledge of Afghanistan Arabic and, until recently, knew not much about the Arabic dialects of Iranian Khorasan. No full monograph has been published on either of these languages. Apart from a few hints, especially Arabkhanedue to being dialectologically uncharted, seemed to be an almost mystified place in western academic discourse. This paper gives information about the type and scope of my research in Khorasan, the localization of Arabkhane‘s 30+ Arabic villages as well as annotated sample texts from Arabkhane and Khalaf. Notably, the texts from my Arabkhane corpus are among the first material ever to be published from this region. Halted fieldwork in the Islamic Republic of Iran will hopefully resume when the COVID-19 pandemic allows. This will include further research on the undocumented dialect of the so-called Khamse Arabs of Fars Province, to which I only briefly refer in the present paper.

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