Kholosi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in two villages in southern Iran that was first described in 2008. At its current status, the language is considered endangered. In 2008, it was only spoken in the neighboring villages of Kholus and

Gotav Gotav ( fa, گتاو, also Romanized as Gotāv; also known as Gotāb, Gūtāb, Gūtu, and Kotāv) is a village in Harang Rural District, Kukherd District, Bastak County, Hormozgan Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 337, in 84 fa ...

. As it is located on the Iranian Plateau and surrounded by Iranian languages, it draws heavily from them.

Classification

Kholosi is definitively known to be an Indo-Aryan language albeit with significant lexical borrowing from Iranian languages given its geographical location. At the lexical level, it seems to share vocabulary largely with the Sindhi languages, which are the source of other Indo-Aryan migrations to the Middle East such as Luwati in Oman.

Phonology

While no published phonology has been found on Kholosi, the following phonology has been constructed from examples provided in the sources below. Kholosi also contains the diphthongs /ɑi, ɑw, ow/ and possibly others. ''Note*'': The phonemes marked with an asterisk are assumed based on the structure of the attested phonemes.

Grammar

Anonby and Bahmani (2013) made some brief notes on Kholosi grammar, but so far no grammatical sketch nor a full grammar of the language has been documented.

Morphology

Nouns and noun phrases

Nouns have inherent grammatical gender, and adjectives agree in gender with the head noun. Attributive adjectives follow the head noun, unlike other Indo-Aryan languages. Numerals precede the head noun.

Verbs and verb phrases

Kholosi uses several light verbs to form noun-verb compounds. This is a common feature of Indo-Iranian languages. The adverb precedes the verb it modifies.

Case and
adposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s

Kholosi has noun-suffixed postpositions (e.g. the

genitive In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...

marker ''-jo'' which agrees with the gender of the possessor) as characteristic of Indo-Aryan languages.

Syntax

Kholosi is a verb-final language with SOV word order.

Vocabulary

Kholosi has roughly twice the number of Indo-Aryan terms in its basic lexicon than Iranian borrowings. The primary source of Iranian borrowings is Persian, but Larestani and Bandari (in the same geographical area) also appear to have contributed vocabulary. A high degree of similarity with Indo-Aryan languages ''Indo-Aryan vocabulary in Kholosi'' ''Kholosi Indo-Iranian vocabulary aligned with Indo-Aryan sound changes'' A significant proportion of structures shared with neighbouring Iranian languages ''Iranian vocabulary in Kholosi'' ''Words illustrating the local character of Iranian vocabulary in Kholosi'' Lack of contrastive aspiration on stops in Kholosi A full fricative series in Kholosi Lack of an implosive series in Kholosi Complex predicates in Kholosi Distinctive structures in Kholosi ''Distinctive Kholosi vocabulary''

References

Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Iran {{IndoAryan-lang-stub