Documenting Dari

Annahita Farudi and Maziar Toosarvandani have two things in common: their love of language and their Iranian heritage. Last summer, they combined the two passions when they traveled to Iran to document and help preserve one of the country’s endangered regional languages, Dari.

Farudi (Linguistics, Comparative Literature ’03) and Toosarvandani (Linguistics, Biology ’03) spent the month of July working with native Dari speakers in Qasemabad, a Zoroastrian village in the city of Yazd.

For Farudi, whose family is Zoroastrian, it was an opportunity to delve into the language of her ancestors. And for both students, it was a chance to learn how Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ancient Persian empire, is practiced today.

“We wanted to do something that had a personal connection,” Toosarvandani said.

Farudi’s aunt, who lives in Iran, took them to Qasemabad and introduced them to her relatives who live in the small village. They made audio recordings of villagers speaking Dari, asked them to translate words and phrases, then transcribed the data.

“We were warmly received,” Toosarvandani said. “People had heard we were coming. They would greet us on the street and give us sayings in Dari.”

Though both students were immersed in linguistics study at U.Va., they didn’t meet until Lise Dobrin, a lecturer in the anthropology department, invited them to team up for an individualized reading course on Farsi linguistics in the fall of 2002.

Dobrin was later instrumental in helping Farudi and Toosarvandani get their research project under way. She assisted them in putting together a research agenda, securing funding and creating a budget for what would become the Dari Language Project. She also helped with the academic side of the project, answering questions by e-mail while they were doing the work in Iran.

“She was a really big help,” Farudi said. “This was our first attempt at field work, so we had lots of questions — how to go about the work, how to deal with people.”

Farudi and Toosarvandani were drawn to the study of linguistics at the same time, but for different reasons.

“I’ve always had a natural interest in languages,” Toosarvandani said. “I speak Farsi with my father and English with my mother. When I got to U.Va., I took a class in linguistics, and I found that I had a natural affinity for the field.”

Farudi’s interest in linguistics is rooted in her love of literature. “I’d always had an interest from a literary aspect,” she said. “After I took the first few classes, I liked the scientific approach to the study of language.”

Farudi has now begun graduate studies in linguistics at the University of Oxford. Toosarvandani has deferred his acceptance into the graduate program in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley to spend the year teaching English in France.

But their work in Iran is far from over. They plan to return to the Zoroastrian village in the summer of 2004 to continue the project, with the help of an additional researcher. They feel a certain sense of urgency, knowing that some of the village elders are among the last living people fluent in Dari.

“When you only have a few speakers left, you can’t bring the language back to life,” Toosarvandani said. Before it’s too late, he and Farudi hope, by studying and documenting Dari, to develop teaching techniques that will resuscitate the language. “With significant efforts Dari could be made vital again,” he said.