Distiniction of the Feminine and Masculine Gender in the Tāti Dialect of Khalkhāl

Tāti is one of the Northwestern Iranian languages spoken in different areas in Iran (called Southern Tāti and sometimes Āzari) and abroad (Northern Tāti). It has retained many of its archaic grammatical features. Southern Tāti is widespread in the southwest areas of Qazvin, Eshtehārd in Karaj province, the two districts of Shāhrud and Khoresh-Rostam in Khalkhāl, Tārom-e Olyā and Kho’in in Zanjān province, Dizmār, Karingān, Kaleybar, Kalāsur in East Āzarbāijān province, and Jirande and Fārāb in Rudbār. The distinction of gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) is one of the most important subjects in linguistics. Gender is generally indicated in different languages in two forms of grammatical and non-grammatical or natural. There has been no research on the distinction of gender in the Tāti dialect of Khalkhāl, although this dialect has retained grammatical gender distinction in nouns, pronouns (personal, demonstrative and possessive pronouns) and verbs. Thegrammatical and natural gender in the Tāti dialect of Khalkhāl has been studied in this paper. In this dialect the feminine nouns are distinct from the corresponding masculine nouns in singular nominative form using a stressless suffix -a, possessive pronouns having -ə and verbs using -â. Natural gender in Tāti has been also studied in one part of the paper. In this dialect, in addition to the words which denote the feminine or masculinegender, there exist morphemes which appear at the beginning of the word and determine its grammatical gender. A list of some feminine and masculine nouns in Tāti has been provided at the end of the paper.