Arrānaji or Qarqahdili Argot in Tāti-Speaking Regions of Khalkhāl

From the viewpoint of sociology of language, one of the important linguistic phenomena in any given society is the formation of argots and their structural description. An argot is the language or the dialect of a social group whose members like the content of their speech remains secret for other groups, or, generally, for the majority of the people in their society. From some decades ago up to now, in some villages of Khalkhāl in Ardabil Province, a language known as Arrānaji or Qarqahdili has been commonly used by male workers who went to northern regions of Iran to do carpentry. The main questions of this study are: a) What kind of language is Qarqahdili? b) Which purpose was it created for?, and c) What are its structural characteristics? The data of this field study were gathered through interviews with middle-aged men of two villages called Karnaq and Lerd. The results indicate that Qarqahdili is an argot which is used to cover occupational secrets. From phonetic, morphological, and syntactic viewpoints Qarqahdili is similar to the Tāti language of the same areas but lexically there are some differences.Save for Tāti words which have gained secret meanings, some words from Azerbaijani Turkish are also present in Qarqahdili. Data analysis indicates that a great number of taboos and sex expressions are used in the workers’ speech apparently because they are all male and far away from their families.