Luri and Bakhtiari

Each spring, Bakhtiari families have for centuries driven their flocks up from the winter pastures of Khuzestan through the gorges and over the snowbound passes of the Zagros to the summer grazing of Chaharmahal. The migration, the kuch, was filmed in 1924 for the documentary Grass, and it continues today, though many families now move their animals by lorry. The language spoken on the road is Bakhtiari, one of the Luri varieties of the central and southern Zagros.

Luri is a Southwestern Iranian language, among the closest living relatives of Persian. Linguists usually distinguish Northern Luri, spoken in Lorestan around Khorramabad and Borujerd; Bakhtiari, spoken in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari and in northern Khuzestan; and Southern Luri, spoken in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad and the Mamasani area of Fars. A Persian speaker can follow a good deal of Luri, but its sounds, words and verb forms are its own. Its speakers usually call it simply Lori or Bakhtiāri.

A sung language

Luri has little written literature but an immense oral one. Its music, carried by the sorna shawm and the dohol drum at weddings and by the kamancheh fiddle, is among the most distinctive of Iran. Bakhtiari and Lur women sing laments for the dead, and men sing of horsemen, bandits and lost loves. Many Luri songs have become well known across Iran through radio and the recordings of popular singers. The quatrains of Baba Taher, the eleventh-century poet of Hamadan, are written in a dialect that many Lurs claim as an early form of their own speech, though scholars disagree about which dialect it was.

The land itself has deep roots. The bronzes of Lorestan, horse bits, finials and weapons cast in the early first millennium BCE, made the province’s name famous among archaeologists and collectors long before anyone outside Iran studied its speech. In Khorramabad the fortress of Falak-ol-Aflak, whose origins are usually traced to the Sasanian era, still stands over the town, and the Lur and Bakhtiari tradition of hospitality, a guest seated in the best place and fed before the family, is as much a part of the culture as the language.

Tribe, land and change

The Bakhtiari confederacy played a prominent part in modern Iranian history: Bakhtiari horsemen marched on Tehran in 1909 in support of the Constitutional Revolution, and Bakhtiari khans held high office afterwards. The tribes were forcibly settled under Reza Shah in the 1930s, and the long modern drift to cities has reduced the number of children learning Luri at home. Lorestan, Kohgiluyeh and the Bakhtiari lands nevertheless keep the language alive in daily life, and in recent years poets, singers and broadcasters have written and recorded more in Luri than ever before.