Documenting Zargari

This project aims to document the highly endangered and undocumented Romani variety, Zargari, spoken by less than 500 people in the Zargar village of northwest Iran. Zargari is perhaps the most curious of all Romani varieties. Zargari’s presence in Iran is the result of eastwards migration of speakers of a European variety of Romani originating in the Balkans during the Ottoman period. Zargari is in unique simultaneous contact with Azeri Turkish and Persian, both of which have had a considerable impact on Zargari’s lexicon and grammar.

To achieve our aim of a comprehensive language documentation, we developed a collaborative and comparative approach that brings together complementary disciplines and linguistic theories, including Romani dialectology, contact linguistics, and sociolinguistics. This project aims to address 3 key research questions about Zargari's fine-grained contact layers: What are the shared linguistic features between Zargari and Balkan Romani varieties? What is the distribution of multi-layered contact influence across Zargari grammar? Which factors have contributed to language maintenance and shift?

The novelty of this approach consists in the combination of comprehensive linguistic analysis with community-driven, in-depth language documentation. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of academic experts and the local language community to address gaps in knowledge and resources. We propose sustainable annotation workflows that prioritize technological inclusion and data migration, allowing for open and easily accessible multimedia documentation of a diverse range of spoken genres.

Leveraging the data and structure of the Dialects of Romani Database (DRD), the most extensive online resource for documenting Romani, we aim to develop a new digital resource for Zargari. To encourage interaction between the scientific and civic communities, we are utilizing various output strategies ranging from scientific articles, video clips, a community dictionary and a documentary film. The documentation outcome will be secured in ARCHE data repository run by Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH)and published on the project’s website and Youtube.

The project brings together a team of experienced individuals and institutions to conduct the first in-depth language documentation of Zargari: Ioana Aminian Jazi (PI) with extensive experience in language documentation; scientific mentor, Prof. Yaron Matras, an expert in Romani studies and language contact; three national collaboration partners, ACDH-CH (host), Vanishing Languages and Cultural Heritage Commission (VLACH), Institute of Iranian Studies (IFI); three Iranian linguists and two local community assistants. The combined expertise of this diverse team will provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the hierarchies of language contact beyond Romani linguistics and set a precedent in endangered language documentation.