Iranian and Persian Studies – serie

This book concerns the native language of the Jews of Shiraz, most of who live in diasporic communities outside of Iran. The language, Judeo-Shirazi, belongs to the Southwest Iranian group, as do most other native vernaculars spoken in southern Iran. None of these languages—unlike other languages of Iranic stock—has been studied in any detail. This is the first novel and detailed look into this language. The author shows Judeo-Shirazi as truly moribund. The result of a ten-year study, this book covers diachrony, phonology, morphosyntax, and lexis, drawn from more than a dozen texts collected from the Shirazi Jewish diaspora living in New York City and Los Angeles areas, as well as unpublished texts collected in Shiraz in 1969, when the speech community was still intact. Conservative as the Shirazi Jewish community  is extremely difficult to find speakers who are often old and linguistically isolated. This work draws from immensely valuable videotapes, supported by the Endangered Language Alliance in New York and the Jewish Language Project in Los Angeles. As an ethnically bounded urban language, Judeo-Shirazi is distinct among the Iranic family. Its study is significant within not only Iranic and Indo-European linguistic scholarship but also in Jewish studies.

This book presents a systematic and detailed analysis of Caspian linguistics, contributing new perspectives to Western scholarship. It is relevant to linguistics interested in West Asian languages and the various related areas of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, cultural linguistics, and historical linguistics.

This ground-breaking book offers an in-depth exploration of the multifaceted nature of politeness and impoliteness in Persian, shedding light on how these communicative strategies are deeply woven into the sociocultural fabric of Iranian society. Anchored in rigorous scholarship, it examines the ways in which Persian speakers manage face, navigate social hierarchies, and express solidarity or dissent through language. From the ritualized and often paradoxical practice of ta’ārof to subtle pragmatic cues that signal respect, resistance, or relational alignment, the chapters reveal how linguistic behavior reflects broader cultural values and social expectations. Bringing together leading scholars and experienced practitioners in the fields of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, the volume offers a rich interdisciplinary perspective on Persian interactional norms. It investigates both everyday exchanges and institutional discourse, highlighting the dynamic interplay between language, identity, and power. By situating Persian politeness phenomena within a global framework, the book challenges Western-centric models and contributes to a more inclusive understanding of linguistic etiquette and interpersonal communication. It is an essential resource for scholars, educators, and students in the fields of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and cultural linguistics, in particular those interested in the politeness features of non-Western languages and the cultural dimensions of discourse.

This volume introduces Alikāyi, an Iranian language spoken on the southern fringe of the Alborz Mountains south of the Caspian Sea. The book offers a fresh perspective on Caspian linguistics. Highlighting the language’s most significant features—such as its unique possession marker, pronominal clitics in nominal morphosyntax, and an innovative verbal system marked by drift toward periphrastic constructions—the book situates Alikāyi within the wider Caspian-language continuum through typological and lexical comparisons. It also explores sociocultural, ecological, and historical dimensions of the Alikāyi tribe, providing insights into patterns of contact, migration, and identity. Texts included at the end of the volume enrich the sociolinguistic portrait and illuminate broader issues in Iranic philology, including tribal formation in medieval Persia. This concise but multifaceted study will appeal to scholars of Iranian linguistics and to researchers engaged in comparative and typological work.

This book traces the long struggle between Iran's national narrative and the competing ideological metanarratives — Islamic and Marxist — that sought to displace it, culminating in the 1979 Revolution, when the national narrative appeared defeated. How did millions of Iranians, across hundreds of cities, come to speak with a unified voice demanding national restoration? And how did decades of cultural suppression fail to silence them? This book argues that the answer lies not in political organization alone, but in the resilience of cultural memory — preserved through Persian literature, pre-Islamic civilizational heritage, and the civic values that persisted beneath ideological domination.  Central to this story is the role of Iranian women. Since the Islamic Republic's founding, women bore a disproportionate burden of repression: veiling mandates, curtailed freedoms, and the systematic erasure of their civic identity. Yet it was women writers, activists, and cultural producers who helped preserve Iran's national story. Through their bestselling novels, they exposed the mechanisms of female subjugation while reclaiming Iran's literary legacy, civic values, and cultural pride — helping forge what this book defines as civil society nationalism: a coherent, affirmative, and organic nationalist movement. This book situates these novels within a broader constellation of cultural resistance: the resurgence of suppressed arts, the emergence of powerful protest slogans, the mobilizing reach of diaspora leaders and media, and the transformative energy of successive uprisings — from the reform era of 1997–2005 through the nationwide protests of 2018 and 2020, to the Women, Life, Freedom movement of 2022, and the Lion and Sun uprising of 2025. Together, these developments reveal how cultural memory does not merely sustain identity — it reorganizes political imagination, transforming historical continuity into collective aspiration.Theoretically, the book makes a case for narrative studies over discourse analysis as the sharper framework for understanding both the 1979 Revolution and Iran's ongoing political transformation. A national narrative is, at its core, a story: layered, dynamic, and enduring — and Iran's, though periodically interrupted, has never been extinguished. Drawing on literary studies, narrative theory, and political history, this book provides essential reading for scholars of Iranian studies, literary criticism, nationalism, and ideology.

This volume offers a new perspective on the Zagros region literary tradition.

This work—divided across three volumes—chronicles three decades of the reign of the Mughal Emperor Shahjahan (1628–1658).

Since it is a court chronicle, the emphasis throughout is on the rise and fall of courtiers, governors, administrators, and military commanders and on incessant military campaigns in the Deccan, Bengal, and Afghanistan, but valuable details of life at court and the architecture of one of India’s most avid builders are also included.

Since it is a court chronicle, the emphasis throughout is on the rise and fall of courtiers, governors, administrators, and military commanders and on incessant military campaigns in the Deccan, Bengal, and Afghanistan, but valuable details of life at court and the architecture of one of India’s most avid builders are also included.

This book analyzes Persian carpets through the holistic and multifaceted perspective of cultural linguistics and semiotics, unveiling the deep connections between art, tradition, and collective memory.

This book investigates the ethical and aesthetic implications of modern Persian narratives. While the dominant traditions of Persian narrative studies reduce all that is in the text to the telos of meaning built on historical facts, this book analyzes narrative experimentation that engages in a critical negotiation with the excesses of the presentation of life. To locate the ethical at the intersection of the narrative and aesthetic, this book articulates an ethical account of a diverse range of narratives in modern Persian Literature in order to demonstrate alternative encounters with manifestations of life, such as pain, death, and trauma. Relevant to literary students and scholars in Near Eastern Studies, and in Persian literature and comparative literature in particular, the book highlights how narrative is a product of societal kinetics.

In doing so, it serves as a cultural manifesto as it pertains to Persian language, poetics, and applied linguistics and is relevant to linguists, cultural scholars, Anthropologists and students in Persian language, literature, and culture and certainly all Iranian languages.