Armenian, Assyrian, Turkmen and other languages of Iran

On a Sunday morning in New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, the bells of Vank Cathedral ring and the liturgy is sung in Classical Armenian, while the congregation talks afterwards in the Armenian of Iran, a variety of Eastern Armenian. Shah Abbas I brought the Armenians of Julfa on the Aras to Isfahan in the early seventeenth century, and their merchants made New Julfa rich. Armenians, who call themselves Hay and their language Hayeren, also live in Tehran, Tabriz and Urmia. They have their own schools, churches, clubs and newspapers, and hold two reserved seats in parliament. Iranian Armenians keep the classical spelling that Soviet Armenia reformed.

Around Urmia and in Tehran, Assyrians speak a Neo-Aramaic language they call Sureth or Soureth, a living descendant of the Aramaic of the ancient Near East, written in the Syriac alphabet. In the 1840s American missionaries in Urmia printed some of the first books in this modern Aramaic. Assyrians and Chaldeans share a reserved seat in the Iranian parliament. In Khuzestan, the Mandaeans keep classical Mandaic, another Aramaic language, for their scriptures, and some still speak a modern form of it.

Turkic languages

In Golestan and North Khorasan, around Gonbad-e Kavus and Bandar Torkaman, the Turkmen speak Turkmen, Türkmençe, an Oghuz Turkic language and the official language of Turkmenistan. The shrine of Magtymguly, the eighteenth-century poet revered by Turkmen as their national poet, stands in Golestan, and draws visitors from both sides of the border. Iran is home to other Turkic peoples too: the Qashqai of Fars speak a Turkic language of their own, close to Azerbaijani, and the Khalaj of Markazi province speak Khalaj, an unusual Turkic language preserving very old features.

Small languages, long histories

Iran’s Jews have spoken and written Persian for over a thousand years, often in the Hebrew alphabet: the Judeo-Persian literature of the fourteenth-century poet Shahin of Shiraz retold the stories of the Torah in the style of the Shahnameh. Jewish communities in Isfahan, Kashan, Yazd and Hamadan also kept their own local dialects, related to the old Median dialects of central Iran and now spoken mainly by older people at home and in the diaspora. In Fereydunshahr, west of Isfahan, descendants of Georgians resettled by Shah Abbas I in the early seventeenth century still speak Georgian, four centuries on.

At the mouth of the Gulf, Kumzari is spoken in the village of Kumzar on the Musandam peninsula of Oman and on the Iranian island of Larak. It is an Iranian language heavily mixed with Arabic, and one of the most endangered languages of the region. Iran’s other languages include Brahui among the Baloch, Semnani and the dialects of the central desert towns, and the many Persian dialects of Khorasan, Fars and Kerman. Together they make the country one of the most linguistically varied in the region.