Some Observations on Persian Copies in Khalaj: Case of Talkhab Dialect

Abstract

Turks and Iranians have interacted in different geographies for centuries. Although the traces of this interaction can be detected in various Iranian and Turkic languages, the obvious examples are presented in Khalaj. Although many archaic features are preserved today, numerous linguistic copies made from Persian are also used in Khalaj. This article focuses on the texts collected from the village of Talkhab, where the majority of the Khalaj population is located. In the texts, it is seen that the features of Persian such as sound, form, syntax etc. are copied into Khalaj as a result of intense language relations. Global lexical and global grammatical copies in these texts are discussed. The use of these units, which can have simple and complex structures, differs according to age groups. When the data collected from different age groups are examined, it has been detected that while the number of lexical copies is higher in the middle (35-60) and upper middle (60-…) age groups, both lexical and grammatical copies are often used in the young population (15-35). However, this article highlights the large number of people fluent in the Khalaj language in the village of Talkhab, which has a multilingual language ecology.