The Semnani languages or Komisenian languages are a group of
Northwestern Iranian languages
The Western Iranic languages are a branch of the Iranic languages, attested from the time of Old Persian (6th century BC) and Median.
Languages
The traditional Northwestern branch is a convention for non-Southwestern languages, rather than a ...
, spoken in
Semnan province (only 68,700 native speakers in 2019) of
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 Turkm ...
that share many linguistic features and structures with
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 grou ...
. These languages are also called "dialects" in some sources. The Semnani languages are descendants of the extinct
Parthian whereas the Caspian languages are descended from the extinct
Median.
There are six Semnani languages named in the literature. Some may be dialects, but there is little published work on their relationships.
*
Semnani (incl. one of several dialects termed 'Biyabunaki')
*
Sangsari
*
Sorkhei
*
Aftari
Iftar ( ar, translit=Iftar Ramadan, إفطار رمضان), also known as (from , , 'breakfast'), (), is the evening meal with which Muslims end their daily Ramadan fast at sunset. They break their fast at the time of the call to prayer (a ...
*
Lasgerdi
Cognate sets[Lecoq, pg. 310.]
Notes
Bibliography
*Pierre Lecoq. 1989. "Les dialectes caspiens et les dialectes du nord-ouest de l'Iran," ''Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum''. Ed. Rüdiger Schmitt. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Pages 296-314.
*Habib Borjian. 2008. “The Komisenian Dialect of Aftar,” Archiv Orientální 76: 379-416.
Northwestern Iranian languages
{{Iran-stub