Documenting Endangered Iranian Languages

Donald Stilo

Donald Stilo (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, stilo(at)eva.mpg.de) has a B.S. in Languages (Russian, French) from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Theoretical Linguistics with a concentration on Iranian languages. He taught Persian for twenty years at the University of Washington and UCLA and other universities in the United States as well as giving occasional courses on Iranian Dialectology, Linguistics of Middle Eastern Languages, and Areal Linguistics. In addition to articles on the typology of Northwest Iranian languages and brief descriptions of some of the latter for the Encyclopaedia Iranica (Gilaki, Hamadani, Isfahani, Gazi, Dialects of Isfahan Province, Mazanderani), Dr. Stilo has published Vafsi Folk Tales, Reichert, 2004 and Modern Persian: Spoken and Written, Volumes I, II (with Kamran Talattof, Jerome Clinton), Yale University Press, 2005.

Dr. Stilo is currently working alternately on three projects at the Max Planck Institute:

• A Grammar of Vafsi (the southernmost of the Tati languages): a 1300-page manuscript is currently in preparation for publication, with a particular emphasis on the typology of Vafsi grammatical constructions (Ergativity and derivatives, the Ditransitive constructions, mobile clitics, Subordination and others).

• The Atlas of Shared Linguistic Features of the Southern Caucasus and Northern Iran.

• The Northwest Iranian Languages Project, with particular emphasis on three subgroups: Caspian (Gilaki-Mazanderani), Central Plateau Dialects and special concentration on the Tatic family (Tati-Talyshi). Material from most Northwestern Iranian languages will also be included in the above Atlas.