Habib Borjian
Biographic Data
| ID | 1442350 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Habib Borjian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Habib |
| FAMILY NAME | Borjian |
| SIGNATURE | BORJIAN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3439-586X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Shāh-e Sarāb
The annual festival of Shāh-e Sarāb has been a major Hazara pilgrimage in Waras district of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Province on the fourteenth day of Jawzā/Khordād (June 4). Drawing on published accounts, virtual ethnography, remote interviews, and satellite imagery, this article describes the shrine and the principal ritual components of the celebration in arguing that Shāh-e Sarāb represents a “Shi’i-ized” continuation of Khordādgān, the ancient …
Shast-Sheshi
The Shast-Sheshi festival is held annually in the village of Siān, beginning on the sixty-sixth day after Nowruz. This timing matches the ancient Khordadgan festival, celebrated on the sixth day of the month of Khordad, dedicated to the Zoroastrian goddess Khordad. The central rite of Shast-Sheshi was immersion in the now-dry Shāh Chashme spring. Other rites include visits to nearby sacred sites linked to Khordad, the female guardian of water. Th…
The Ecbatanic Language Group
This paper introduces the Jewish vernaculars of Nehavand and Khonsar and proposes the term “Ecbatanic”—derived from Ecbatana, the ancient Greek name for Hamadan—to avoid confusion with Judeo-Hamadani proper. The idea emerged during my study of Khonsar, the only Persian town in which both Muslims and Jews spoke Central Plateau-type languages. Surprisingly, these dialects differed: while Muslim Khonsari aligns with its expected areal pattern, Judeo…
The Bavadi and Their Bakhtiari Dialect
This paper provides a sociolinguistic and grammatical synopsis of Bavadi Bakhtiari, spoken in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province, Iran. The results presented here are based on the collection of linguistic and cultural data through field research, including ethnographic research, recording of oral texts, elicitation of a language data questionnaire, and follow-up interviews with speakers of the language. In addition to providing a linguistic snaps…
Gurughli
The epic folk story of Köroğlu, popular among various Turkic peoples, was also widespread among the Tajiks of the upper Oxus valleys of southern Tajikistan and adjoining Badakhshān of northern Afghanistan. The Tajik versions of the story, known as Gurughli or Gurghuli, while sharing parts of the plot and outline with Köroğlu, are distinctly shaped by Tajik culture and Iranian national traditions in both form and content. This study explores vario…
Kermāšāni
Caspian Language of Šahmirzād
Located in the Semnān area (midway between Tehran and Khorasan), the town of Šahmirzād and its neighboring villages are home to speakers of Šahmirzādi, a vernacular sharply differing from the other language types spoken in the Semnān area but closely related to the Mazandarani language spoken across the Alborz range to the north, along the Caspian coast. This article studies Šahmirzādi phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, with a look at cross-ling…
The Perside Language of Shiraz Jewry
This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval …
Mazandarani
Judeo-Isfahani
This article studies the native language of the Isfahani Jewish community. A description of the provenance of the community is followed by the sociolinguistic situation in the diaspora. The language description includes phonology and morphosyntax, with an emphasis on poorly studied features. The article is supplemented with texts and a glossary. The data was collected in Isfahan and from the diaspora community in New York City
The Language of the Kharg Island
Khargi is spoken on the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf. A member of the Southwest branch of the Iranian languages, Khargi is related to the languages spoken in the province of Fārs and along the coastal line down to the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting extensive maritime contact, yet does not lend itself to any of the known subgroups of the family. As Khargi remains largely obscure, this article offers a morphosyntax and lexical analysis based o…
The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq
Located in the Caspian forest south of the capital city of Sāri in Mazandaran, the rural district of Kalijān Rostāq is home to a number of close-knit villages which share a local Mazandarani dialect. The vernacular offers some authentic features in phonology, morphology, and lexis that are otherwise lost in the urban variety spoken in Sāri due to contact with Persian. In an attempt to elucidate on the loosely-known aspects of the Mazandarani lang…
Traces of Pharyngeal Consonants in Isfahani Persian
The word-final /-a/ and the diphthong /ay/ of earlier New Persian shift respectively to /-e/ and /ey/ in modern Persian. Isfahani Persian follows suit, e.g. dande “rib” and meydun “plaza.” However, the earlier phonemes survive only in a finite set of words: Arabic loanwords in which the /a/ succeeds pharyngeal consonants, e.g. ǰomʾa ( aː in qânaː (< qāniʿ ) “content,” maːmâr (< miʿmār ) “architect.” This article investigates these phonological ir…
A Persian View of the Steppe Iranians
By the turn of the second to first millennium BCE, the Iranian-speaking tribes of the Steppe Bronze Cultures had parted into two main groups: those who migrated south eventually into the plateau which bears their name to this date, and those who expanded their domain within the steppes, westward into the Volga and Pontic regions and beyond, and southward well into the Caucasus and Cen tral Asia. These two main branches of the same people evolved …
Juhuri
Juhuri is a dialect of the Tat language of the eastern Caucasus (specifically, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). Although Juhuri is dialectologically related to Persian, it is not mutually intelligible with any Persian dialect. The Juhuri speakers, called Mountain Jews, are estimated at around 200,000, most of whom have immigrated to Israel and the United States. The New York community is largely centered in Brooklyn around the Kavkazi Jewish Congregatio…
What Is Judeo-Median—and How Does it Differ from Judeo-Persian
The Iranian languages spoken by the Jews are often lumped under the term “Judeo-Persian.” Yet properly construed, the latter term refers to forms of Persian written with the Hebrew script. The corpus of Judeo-Persian texts is significant for both linguistic and literary reasons, because it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews. However, there are also severa…
The Caspian Dialect of Kujūr in the Central Alborz
Spoken in the district of Kujūr in the Māzandarān province, Kujūri is the westernmost dialect of Māzandarāni, also known as Ṭabari, a language of some four million speakers. Kujūri exhibits transitional characteristics between Māzandarāni proper, spoken in the plains of eastern Māzandarān, and the Central Caspian language group, neither of which has received proper scholarly attention. This study offers a sketch grammar of Kujūri, with an emphasi…
The Dialects of Velātru and Gachsar
South-central Alborz is a language transition zone bounded by Persian, Māzandarāni, Central Caspian and Tatic language groups. In the lofty valleys of this area, separated from Tehran by a mountain chain, rest villages with vanishing dialects that show various degrees of affinity with the neighbouring languages. The two dialects studied here, namely Velātruyi and Gachsari, belong to two different language groups, despite their geographical proxim…
Judeo-Kashani
The Extinct Dialect of Tajrish
Once spoken in the Alborz foothills north of Tehran, the vernacular of Shemirān and its administrative center Tajrish was greatly influenced by the Caspian languages spoken northward across the Alborz range, in its valleys and in the Caspian littoral. This study of Tajrishi draws on the texts collected by Valentin Zhukovskii in the 1880s as well as two recent documentations of smaller size. It reveals that Tajrishi and the adjoining vernaculars c…
The Dialect of Jowshaqan Part One
This article presents the grammar of Jowshaqani, a Central Iranian dialect. Like other members of this group, Jowshaqani has its own peculiarities; for instance, it has a rich inventory of personal pronouns distinguished by gender in the 3rd person singular, as do verb endings: nen ate “he comes”, néna atea “she comes”, etc. The past tenses of transitive verbs are inflected ergatively, with the agential affixes, which float through the sentence y…
Median Succumbs to Persian after Three Millennia of Coexistence
The so-called Central Plateau Dialects or simply Central Dialects belong to the South Median group of Northwest Iranian languages and are spoken in central Iran, where the prevailing language is Persian. Currently, vestiges of these dialects are limited to several dozen remote villages as well as to the older generation of the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities living in the cities and in diaspora. The dominant influence of Persian for more than …
Two Mazandarani Texts from the Nineteenth Century
This article transcribes, translates, and compiles a glossary for two Mazandarani texts written in 1889 in the town of Barforush and published as facsimiles by Jacques de Morgan. The language of the texts, Mazandarani or New Tabari, is fundamentally similar to that spoken today by more than three million people in the Persian province of Mazandaran, located south of the Caspian Sea. However, there are several extinct words and grammatical traits …
The Last Gālesh Herdsman
This article includes part of the linguistic material we documented in 2002 from a galesh ranch in central-eastern Mazandaran. It transcribes, translates, and glosses two texts related by a patriarch on his long, eventful life: the dramatic elopement with the girl he married, his successful family life and career as a pastoral nomad, and his long resistance against the laws forcing the galesh families to evacuate the forest for good. Notwithstand…
Tabarica II Some Mazandarani Verbs
This paper studies the Tabari verbs bāutεn 'to say', baitεn 'to seize', hākεrdεn 'to do', and daptuniεn 'to throw'. It proposes that the past stem of 'say' is derived from the Old Iranian *gaub- rather than the commonly assumed root *wač-. It postulates also that the nasal element in the present stem kεn- 'do' is not exclusively due to the integration of the old participial formant *-ant-, but also because the stem is an offspring of a nasalised …
Juhuri
Juhuri is a dialect of the Tat language of the eastern Caucasus (specifically, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). Although Juhuri is dialectologically related to Persian, it is not mutually intelligible with any Persian dialect. The Juhuri speakers, called Mountain Jews, are estimated at around 200,000, most of whom have immigrated to Israel and the United States. The New York community is largely centered in Brooklyn around the Kavkazi Jewish Congregatio…
Mazandaran
town of Amol (Amul). Mazandaran, as the name of the present province, first appeared in the Saljuq period, along with the older name, and had completely substituted Tabaristan by the middle of the Safavid reign
Tabarica II Some Mazandarani Verbs
This paper studies the Tabari verbs bāutεn 'to say', baitεn 'to seize', hākεrdεn 'to do', and daptuniεn 'to throw'. It proposes that the past stem of 'say' is derived from the Old Iranian *gaub- rather than the commonly assumed root *wač-. It postulates also that the nasal element in the present stem kεn- 'do' is not exclusively due to the integration of the old participial formant *-ant-, but also because the stem is an offspring of a nasalised …
Talish and the Talishis (The State of Research)
tory (see Mirza Ahmad Lankorani 2002; cf. also Hesam al-Saltaneh 1968). Peter the Great occupied the region for a short time in 1732; it was again occupied by Russia in 1796-1812, but finally its greater part, north of the Astara river, became part of the Russian domain (Weidenbaum 1888), and a century later, the Soviet Union. It was in Lenkoran, the only major urban centre within the Talishi-speaking lands, that, during the unruly period of Musa…
Judeo-Kashani
Caspian Language of Šahmirzād
Located in the Semnān area (midway between Tehran and Khorasan), the town of Šahmirzād and its neighboring villages are home to speakers of Šahmirzādi, a vernacular sharply differing from the other language types spoken in the Semnān area but closely related to the Mazandarani language spoken across the Alborz range to the north, along the Caspian coast. This article studies Šahmirzādi phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, with a look at cross-ling…
Median Succumbs to Persian after Three Millennia of Coexistence
The so-called Central Plateau Dialects or simply Central Dialects belong to the South Median group of Northwest Iranian languages and are spoken in central Iran, where the prevailing language is Persian. Currently, vestiges of these dialects are limited to several dozen remote villages as well as to the older generation of the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities living in the cities and in diaspora. The dominant influence of Persian for more than …
A Mazandarani Account of the Babi Incident at Shaikh Tabarsi
This article transcribes and glosses a nineteenth-century Mazandarani document on Babi-state conflict at Shaikh Tabarsi. Collected in 1860 in the town of Barfurush, it was published five years later by Boris Andreevich Dorn in Perso-Arabic characters. The text is the first known prose document based on natural speech in the modern Mazandarani language. The language of the text is fundamentally the same as that spoken today in the Persian province…
Mazandaran
town of Amol (Amul). Mazandaran, as the name of the present province, first appeared in the Saljuq period, along with the older name, and had completely substituted Tabaristan by the middle of the Safavid reign
Talish and the Talishis (The State of Research)
tory (see Mirza Ahmad Lankorani 2002; cf. also Hesam al-Saltaneh 1968). Peter the Great occupied the region for a short time in 1732; it was again occupied by Russia in 1796-1812, but finally its greater part, north of the Astara river, became part of the Russian domain (Weidenbaum 1888), and a century later, the Soviet Union. It was in Lenkoran, the only major urban centre within the Talishi-speaking lands, that, during the unruly period of Musa…
Tabari Language Materials from Il'ya Berezin's Recherches sur les dialectes persans
The paper studies and summarises the linguistic materials on Tabari found in I. N. Berezin's "Recherches sur les dialectes persans". This book was the first attempt in Iranian dialectology, but due to the inaccuracies and incoherent transcription it has largely been ignored since its publication in 1953. Tabari, one of the Iranian languages studied in the book, has more than three million speakers in the Persian province of Mazandaran on the sout…
A Mazandarani Account of the Babi Incident at Shaikh Tabarsi
This article transcribes and glosses a nineteenth-century Mazandarani document on Babi-state conflict at Shaikh Tabarsi. Collected in 1860 in the town of Barfurush, it was published five years later by Boris Andreevich Dorn in Perso-Arabic characters. The text is the first known prose document based on natural speech in the modern Mazandarani language. The language of the text is fundamentally the same as that spoken today in the Persian province…
Sources on the Alans
Ethno-Linguistic Materials from Rural Mazandaran
The texts published here are in an eastern Mazandarani dialect spoken in the Caspian littoral in northern Iran. The informant is a rural woman who recollects the supernatural deeds of her father-in-law, revered like a saint after his death. The stories are narrated in a most intimate manner, something rarely published previously in Iranian dialect documentations. The folkloric songs typify those sung in Caspian rice paddies by women, who traditio…
Two Mazandarani Texts from the Nineteenth Century
This article transcribes, translates, and compiles a glossary for two Mazandarani texts written in 1889 in the town of Barforush and published as facsimiles by Jacques de Morgan. The language of the texts, Mazandarani or New Tabari, is fundamentally similar to that spoken today by more than three million people in the Persian province of Mazandaran, located south of the Caspian Sea. However, there are several extinct words and grammatical traits …
The Last Gālesh Herdsman
This article includes part of the linguistic material we documented in 2002 from a galesh ranch in central-eastern Mazandaran. It transcribes, translates, and glosses two texts related by a patriarch on his long, eventful life: the dramatic elopement with the girl he married, his successful family life and career as a pastoral nomad, and his long resistance against the laws forcing the galesh families to evacuate the forest for good. Notwithstand…
Tabarica II Some Mazandarani Verbs
This paper studies the Tabari verbs bāutεn 'to say', baitεn 'to seize', hākεrdεn 'to do', and daptuniεn 'to throw'. It proposes that the past stem of 'say' is derived from the Old Iranian *gaub- rather than the commonly assumed root *wač-. It postulates also that the nasal element in the present stem kεn- 'do' is not exclusively due to the integration of the old participial formant *-ant-, but also because the stem is an offspring of a nasalised …
Median Succumbs to Persian after Three Millennia of Coexistence
The so-called Central Plateau Dialects or simply Central Dialects belong to the South Median group of Northwest Iranian languages and are spoken in central Iran, where the prevailing language is Persian. Currently, vestiges of these dialects are limited to several dozen remote villages as well as to the older generation of the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities living in the cities and in diaspora. The dominant influence of Persian for more than …
The Dialect of Jowshaqan Part One
This article presents the grammar of Jowshaqani, a Central Iranian dialect. Like other members of this group, Jowshaqani has its own peculiarities; for instance, it has a rich inventory of personal pronouns distinguished by gender in the 3rd person singular, as do verb endings: nen ate “he comes”, néna atea “she comes”, etc. The past tenses of transitive verbs are inflected ergatively, with the agential affixes, which float through the sentence y…
The Extinct Dialect of Tajrish
Once spoken in the Alborz foothills north of Tehran, the vernacular of Shemirān and its administrative center Tajrish was greatly influenced by the Caspian languages spoken northward across the Alborz range, in its valleys and in the Caspian littoral. This study of Tajrishi draws on the texts collected by Valentin Zhukovskii in the 1880s as well as two recent documentations of smaller size. It reveals that Tajrishi and the adjoining vernaculars c…
The Dialects of Velātru and Gachsar
South-central Alborz is a language transition zone bounded by Persian, Māzandarāni, Central Caspian and Tatic language groups. In the lofty valleys of this area, separated from Tehran by a mountain chain, rest villages with vanishing dialects that show various degrees of affinity with the neighbouring languages. The two dialects studied here, namely Velātruyi and Gachsari, belong to two different language groups, despite their geographical proxim…
Judeo-Kashani
The Caspian Dialect of Kujūr in the Central Alborz
Spoken in the district of Kujūr in the Māzandarān province, Kujūri is the westernmost dialect of Māzandarāni, also known as Ṭabari, a language of some four million speakers. Kujūri exhibits transitional characteristics between Māzandarāni proper, spoken in the plains of eastern Māzandarān, and the Central Caspian language group, neither of which has received proper scholarly attention. This study offers a sketch grammar of Kujūri, with an emphasi…
What Is Judeo-Median—and How Does it Differ from Judeo-Persian
The Iranian languages spoken by the Jews are often lumped under the term “Judeo-Persian.” Yet properly construed, the latter term refers to forms of Persian written with the Hebrew script. The corpus of Judeo-Persian texts is significant for both linguistic and literary reasons, because it includes some of the earliest documents of New Persian, and because it constitutes a sizable literature written by Persian Jews. However, there are also severa…
Juhuri
Juhuri is a dialect of the Tat language of the eastern Caucasus (specifically, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). Although Juhuri is dialectologically related to Persian, it is not mutually intelligible with any Persian dialect. The Juhuri speakers, called Mountain Jews, are estimated at around 200,000, most of whom have immigrated to Israel and the United States. The New York community is largely centered in Brooklyn around the Kavkazi Jewish Congregatio…
A Persian View of the Steppe Iranians
By the turn of the second to first millennium BCE, the Iranian-speaking tribes of the Steppe Bronze Cultures had parted into two main groups: those who migrated south eventually into the plateau which bears their name to this date, and those who expanded their domain within the steppes, westward into the Volga and Pontic regions and beyond, and southward well into the Caucasus and Cen tral Asia. These two main branches of the same people evolved …
Mazandarani
Judeo-Isfahani
This article studies the native language of the Isfahani Jewish community. A description of the provenance of the community is followed by the sociolinguistic situation in the diaspora. The language description includes phonology and morphosyntax, with an emphasis on poorly studied features. The article is supplemented with texts and a glossary. The data was collected in Isfahan and from the diaspora community in New York City
The Language of the Kharg Island
Khargi is spoken on the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf. A member of the Southwest branch of the Iranian languages, Khargi is related to the languages spoken in the province of Fārs and along the coastal line down to the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting extensive maritime contact, yet does not lend itself to any of the known subgroups of the family. As Khargi remains largely obscure, this article offers a morphosyntax and lexical analysis based o…
The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq
Located in the Caspian forest south of the capital city of Sāri in Mazandaran, the rural district of Kalijān Rostāq is home to a number of close-knit villages which share a local Mazandarani dialect. The vernacular offers some authentic features in phonology, morphology, and lexis that are otherwise lost in the urban variety spoken in Sāri due to contact with Persian. In an attempt to elucidate on the loosely-known aspects of the Mazandarani lang…
Traces of Pharyngeal Consonants in Isfahani Persian
The word-final /-a/ and the diphthong /ay/ of earlier New Persian shift respectively to /-e/ and /ey/ in modern Persian. Isfahani Persian follows suit, e.g. dande “rib” and meydun “plaza.” However, the earlier phonemes survive only in a finite set of words: Arabic loanwords in which the /a/ succeeds pharyngeal consonants, e.g. ǰomʾa ( aː in qânaː (< qāniʿ ) “content,” maːmâr (< miʿmār ) “architect.” This article investigates these phonological ir…
The Perside Language of Shiraz Jewry
This study concerns the native language of Shirazi Jews, most of whom live in diasporic communities outside Iran. The language Judeo-Shirazi belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native languages spoken in southern Iran. As such, Judeo-Shirazi shows general agreements with native rural varieties spoken in inland Fārs. There are, however, phonological features suggesting that Judeo-Shirazi is an insular survivor of the Medieval …
Caspian Language of Šahmirzād
Located in the Semnān area (midway between Tehran and Khorasan), the town of Šahmirzād and its neighboring villages are home to speakers of Šahmirzādi, a vernacular sharply differing from the other language types spoken in the Semnān area but closely related to the Mazandarani language spoken across the Alborz range to the north, along the Caspian coast. This article studies Šahmirzādi phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, with a look at cross-ling…
History (26 works) · History (21 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · Geography (18 works) · Linguistics and Cultural Studies (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Linguistics and language evolution (15 works) · Eurasian Exchange Networks (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Ancient history (12 works)