Tat language (Caucasus)

This article is about one of southwestern Iranian languages close to or varietry of Persian and used in Caucasus. For the other separate group, see Tati (Iran).

Tat
Tati
Spoken in	Azerbaijan, Israel, Russia, USA
Region	Northeastern Azerbaijan
Native speakers	28,000 excluding Judeo-Tat  (no date)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Southwestern Iranian (Persid) Tat Tat
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ttt
Linguasphere	58-AAC-g

The Tat language or Tat/Tati Persian^[1] or Tati is a Southwestern Iranian language and a variety of Persian^{[1][2][3][4][5]} spoken by the Tats in Azerbaijan and Russia. According to the Ethnologue, it's spoken by 18,000 people in Azerbaijan, 8000 in Iran, and 2300 in Russia.^[6] Its written form is related to Middle Persian Pahlavi. There is also a Jewish language called Judeo-Tat that is derived from the Tat language.

Vladimir Minorsky mentions in the first edition of Encyclopaedia of Islam that like most Persian dialects, Tati is not very regular in its charecteristics, and occupies a position between modern Persian and the Caspian dialects.^[7] According to him, The Great Russian Encyclopedia of 1901 gives the number of Tati speakers in 1901 as 135,000.^[7] In the 1930s, Minorsky estimated the number of Tati speakers to be 90,000 and the decrease to be the result of gradual Turkicization.^[7]

Tat is endangered,^[8][9] classified as "severely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.^[10]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Gernot Windfuhr, "Persian Grammer: history and state of its study", Walter de Gruyter, 1979. pg 4:""Tat- Persian spoken in the East Caucasus""
2. ^ V. Minorsky, "Tat" in M. Th. Houtsma et al., eds., The Encyclopædia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, 4 vols. and Suppl., Leiden: Late E.J. Brill and London: Luzac, 1913–38.
3. ^ V. Minorsky, "Tat" in M. Th. Houtsma et al., eds., The Encyclopædia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, 4 vols. and Suppl., Leiden: Late E.J. Brill and London: Luzac, 1913–38. Excerpt: Like most Persian dialects, Tati is not very regular in its characteristic features"
4. ^ C Kerslake, Journal of Islamic Studies (2010) 21 (1): 147-151. excerpt:"It is a comparison of the verbal systems of three varieties of Persian—standard Persian, Tat, and Tajik—in terms of the 'innovations' that the latter two have developed for expressing finer differentiations of tense, aspect and modality..." [1]
5. ^ Borjian, Habib, "Tabari Language Materials from Il'ya Berezin's Recherches sur les dialectes persans", Iran and the Caucasus, Volume 10, Number 2, 2006 , pp. 243-258(16). Excerpt:"It embraces Gilani, Ta- lysh, Tabari, Kurdish, Gabri, and the Tati Persian of the Caucasus, all but the last belonging to the north-western group of Iranian language."
6. ^ Ethnologue report for Tat
7. ^ ^{a b c} V. Minorsky, "Tat" in M. Th. Houtsma et al., eds., The Encyclopædia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, 4 vols. and Suppl., Leiden: Late E.J. Brill and London: Luzac, 1913–38. Excerpt: Like most Persian dialects, Tati is not very regular in its characteristic features"
8. ^ Published in: Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages. Edited by Christopher Moseley. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. 211–280.
9. ^ Do the Talysh and Tat Languages Have a Future in Azerbaijan?
10. ^ UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger

External links

• Language Map of Azerbaijan.