Director

Iranian Languages Corpora

I’m Esfandiar Taheri a Professor of Iranian Languages at the University of Isfahan and the Diector of the Iranian Languages Corpora. I was born in 1977 in a village of Semirom County, Iran. After completing my higher education in Ancient Iranian Languages at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran, I eventually joined the Department of Linguistics at the University of Isfahan in 2014. Since then, I have been engaged in teaching Iranian languages and conducting research in this field.
A major part of my work today focuses on documentation of endangered Iranian languages. My first project in this area focused on documentation of Jowshaqani, an endangered Iranian language in Central Iran. That project supported by ELDP and is now archived in the Endangered Languages Archive (www.elararchive.org). Wanting to take this work further, I launched the Iranian Languages Corpora — a platform designed to both provide a valuable corpus for researchers and to encourage active participation from native speakers of Iranian languages in the documentation of Iranian languages and cultures.

Books and research projects

  • Bakhtiari Dialect of Koohrang, Tehran: Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2010
  • Lori Boyer Ahmadi Dialect, Tehran: Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2016
  • Documentation of Jowsheqani, a Central Iranian language, ELDP/SOAS, 2017, www.elararchive.org

Selection of articles

  • "On the Number of Nouns in Badrudi", Linguistic Research, 1/16, No. 30, 1403, 25-38
  • "Pronoun Phrase Closures in Joshaghani, Evidence of Pre-closure and Inter-closure Formation", Comparative Linguistics Research, 22, 1400, 75-93.
  • “On a special construction for the expression in the flow in Iranian languages”, Persian Language and Iranian Dialects, 6/2, 1401, 28-7.
  •   Farvi: an Iranian Language in Kavir Desert, Iranian Studies, 2021, 54 (5-6), 807-742
  • "On the Construction and Function of Future-Forming Constructions in Joshaghani", Linguistic Research, 1/13, No. 24, 2017, 21-40.
  • "The grammaticalization process of the plural suffix gal- in Iranian languages," Linguistics, 12/37, 2019, 197-217
  • "Peykani, one of the Central Iranian dialects in the Isfahan dialect", Iranian Linguistics and Dialects, 1/5, 2019, 155-179.
  • "Dialectal Words and Structures in Baba Taher's Couplets", Comparative Linguistics Research, 14, 2017, 42-23.
  • "Relative dating of phonetic changes in Iranian languages," Journal of Linguistics, 2019, 11/33, 63-81.