Analysis of Phylogenetic Tree of Iranian Languages with an Evolutionary Biology Approach

Current spoken languages in the world, are the product of centuries of transmutation within human societies. Languages were not created over night, yet they have transformed through a gradual process in which they have distanced themselves from the spoken words of our ancestors and developed into the modern day languages and dialects in use. The historical journey of our spoken words with their transmutation and evolution, has been the subject of many studies through time. Resemblance between the evolution and diversification of languages with that of living species has promoted scientists to apply the developed models of biological evolution aided by data processing tools developed by the advancements in computer sciences to study the historical evolution of languages and discover affinities and the approximate time of their transmutation from the dialects of their ancestors. Such methods have been utilized to study the genealogy of languages in the past, especially for Indo-European family of languages and dialects. In this article, the authors have utilized prevalent models in evolution biology to chart the genealogy of 49 Iranian (Persian) dialects. It is hoped that advancement of the proposed method will result in collection, documentation and study of all Iranian dialects.