The Daylami language, also known as ''Daylamite'', ''Deilami'', ''Dailamite'', or ''Deylami'' (Deilami: , from the name of the

Daylam Daylam, also known in the plural form Daylaman (and variants such as Dailam, Deylam, and Deilam), was the name of a mountainous region of inland Gilan, Iran. It was so named for its inhabitants, known as the Daylamites. The Church of the East es ...

region), is an

extinct language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, l ...

that was one of the northwestern branch of the

Iranian languages The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian languages are groupe ...

. It was spoken in northern

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

, specifically in the mountainous area in Gīlān, Mazandaran, and

Ghazvin Qazvin (; fa, قزوین, , also Romanized as ''Qazvīn'', ''Qazwin'', ''Kazvin'', ''Kasvin'', ''Caspin'', ''Casbin'', ''Casbeen'', or ''Ghazvin'') is the largest city and capital of the Province of Qazvin in Iran. Qazvin was a capital of the ...

Provinces.

Parviz Natel Khanlari Parviz Natel Khanlari ( fa, پرویز ناتل خانلری; March 20, 1914 – August 23, 1990) was an Iranian literary scholar, linguist, author, researcher, politician, and professor at Tehran University. Biography Parviz Natel Khanlari g ...

listed this language as one of Iranian dialects spoken between the 9th and 13th centuries.

Istakhri Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri () (also ''Estakhri'', fa, استخری, i.e. from the Iranian city of Istakhr, b. - d. 346 AH/AD 957) was a 10th-century travel-author and geographer who wrote valuable accounts in Arab ...

, a medieval Iranian geographer, has written about this language, as did Al-Muqaddasi, a medieval Arab geographer, who wrote "they have an obscure language and they use the phoneme ''khe'' /x/ a lot." Abū Esḥāq Ṣābī had a similar report on people in the Deylam highlands who spoke a distinct language. According to Wilfered Madelung, in the early Islamic period the language of the Deylamites was a northwestern Iranian language. One of the characteristics of this language was an added ī sound between consonants and ā ( Lāhījān=Līāhījān, Amīrkā=Amīrkīā).Wilferd Maelung, Deylamite
Encyclopedia Iranica

Notes

{{Iranian languages Northwestern Iranian languages Languages of Iran Extinct languages of Asia Languages attested from the 9th century Languages extinct in the 13th century Caspian languages