Maryam Nourzaei

Language contact in Kholosi

Marya Nourzaei (Uppsala University)

I will present preliminary result of my documentation project on Kholosi (a work in progress). Kholosi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in two villages in Hormozgan province of Iran. It has been surrounded by Iranic and sematic language families. Total number of Kholosi people is not certain, however, based on my field work data is around 1.700. The Kholosi speakers are multilingual. Data are stem from an extensive on-going corpus of spoken Kholosi narratives.

Kholosi due to long term-contacts with Iranic languages has been borrowed in particular morphosyntactic properties e.g., plural marker, Ezafe construction, preposition, singularity, and numeral system and classifiers, which has been mentioned in the theories of language contacts and for other languages in contact with Iranic (Matras: 2009). There is a competition between borrowing and inherited morphosyntactic properties. There is however, a tendency toward dominant Iranic features among the younger speakers. The old generation narratives still show more archaic Indo-Aryan features.