Gilaki and Mazandarani

Cross the Alborz from Tehran and the land changes in an hour: the dry slopes give way to forest, rice paddies and tea gardens, and the speech changes with it. Along the south shore of the Caspian, people speak Gilaki in Gilan, around Rasht and Lahijan, and Mazandarani, also called Tabari, in Mazandaran and the western part of Golestan. Both are Northwestern Iranian languages, related to Persian but distinct from it, and a Tehrani visitor listening to a conversation in a Rasht market will catch only part of it.

Their isolation behind the mountains gave the Caspian provinces a long separate history. Tabaristan, as Mazandaran was called, was ruled by local dynasties for centuries after the Arab conquest of the plateau, and Islam arrived there late. In the tenth century a prince of the Bavandid dynasty, Marzban ibn Rustam, composed a book of fables in Tabari, the Marzbān-nāmeh. The original is lost, but a Persian version made by Sa‘d al-Din Varavini in the early thirteenth century became a classic of Persian prose.

Songs of the forest and the paddy

Both languages are sung more than written. In Mazandaran the verses known as amiri, attributed to the poet Amir Pazvari, whose dates are uncertain, are sung by shepherds and farmers; their melancholy tunes are among the best loved in the north. Gilaki has a rich store of work songs, lullabies and humorous verse, and in the twentieth century poets such as Mohammad-Ali Afrashteh wrote in it. Nima Yushij, the father of modern Persian poetry, was born in Yush in the mountains of Mazandaran and wrote a collection of poems in Tabari as well as his Persian work.

Both languages differ from Persian in their grammar as well as their words: they usually place the adjective before the noun and the possessor before what is possessed, where Persian does the reverse. In the uplands of Gilan and Mazandaran, the Galesh herders, who move their cattle between the forest and the high pastures, have their own varieties of speech and a store of herding songs, and the stepped villages and rice-straw roofs of the lowlands are as distinctive as the language.

A changing coast

Gilaki and Mazandarani are still spoken daily by millions of people, especially in villages and small towns, but Persian dominates schooling, broadcasting and the cities, and many children now grow up understanding the local language better than they speak it. Both appear in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. In response, local writers, musicians and broadcasters have produced dictionaries, poetry collections and songs, and provincial broadcasters carry some programmes in them. Seasonal festivals, such as the Tirgan celebrations of midsummer in Mazandaran, are still marked with songs in the local tongue.