When and How Did the Vernacular of Isfahan Shift to Persian?

Alongside its political and social significance, Isfahan was a centre of learning throughout the medieval history of Persia. In the earlier Islamic centuries, it was a canon of Arabic learning and attracted scholars from throughout the lands of Eastern Caliphate. When Avicenna came to settle in Isfahan, he soon realized that his knowledge of Arabic required much improvement, notwithstanding the fact that he had already compiled his famous Canon of Medicine in Arabic. Persian is also deeply rooted in Isfahan for centuries, ever since it gained the status of lingua franca throughout the Persianate world. Isfahan was one of the first among Persian towns to adopt New Persian as the literary language. The mass migrations from Transoxiana and Khorasan into central and western Persia, triggered by the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, further reinforced the position of Persian in Isfahan, so much so that the city became a canon of Persian literature and a stage from which Persian began to diffuse into other towns of Persia. In our time Isfahan is one of the purest towns in the nation in terms of language: save for the small Armenian community, Persian is virtually the only idiom of communication among the inhabitants, whose Persian accent is generally perceived as a provincial variety par excellence. Notwithstanding all these, the spoken vernacular of Isfahan was not Persian but a variety of what is known today as Central Dialects, i.e. the idioms still spoken in central Iranian Plateau in dozens of villages, including those in Isfahan district. These dialects can be characterized on geographical and linguistic grounds as Median, within the Northwest Iranian family of languages, contrasting with Persian which belongs to the Perside or Southwest group. Some Median documents from Isfahan are available from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, Median had survived only among the Jewish community of the town as well as in some remote villages. Therefore, the language shift among the bulk of city dwellers must have occurred between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper attempts to establish how and when the language shift took place by examining both the historical and contemporary linguistic data.