The quotative marker in Gilaki

Abstract

Gilaki belongs to the Caspian subgroup of Northwest Iranian and can be divided into two major dialect groups, Western Gilaki with Rasht as its center and Eastern Gilaki with Lahijan as its center (Stilo 2001: 660). There are between two and three million speakers, most of whom are bilingual in Gilaki and Persian. The following is a first presentation of reported speech in Gilaki or, more exactly, the quotative marker in Rashti, i.e., the Western Gilaki dialect of the city of Rasht. The language data used in this chapter derive from a corpus of about thirty minutes of audio recordings of natural speech and dialogues or spontaneously narrated stories of Gilaki speakers raised in (or around) Rasht. Thus, the results presented here hold true only for Rashti for certain. The situation in other Western Gilaki variants or Eastern Gilaki must be left open. However, concluding from a remark of a speaker of Eastern Gilaki saying that “people in Rasht speak like this” (i.e., with the quotative marker), it is possible that no (or no similar) quotative marker exists in Eastern Gilaki. There are not many sources available that describe Gilaki, and no descriptions of reported speech in this language, a topic often neglected in grammars. The most comprehensive grammar (Rastorgeuva et al. 1971) and the most recent (but short) description by Stilo (2001) do not treat reported speech; likewise Sartippur (1990). This chapter intends to be a contribution to fill this gap. On the other hand, however, I also hope to show that Gilaki exhibits typologically interesting features with regard to reported speech in general as well as in Iranian languages in particular.