Word order Typology in Western and Eastern Varieties of Gilaki

Gilaki is a northwestern Iranian language, It has two main different varieties, belonging to east and west of Gilan. These two varieties are significantly different which may partially cause difficulties in mutual understanding. This paper aims to study and compare the differences and similarities between these two varieties from the word order typology point of view. For this, word order typology in Rasht dialect as the western variety and Lahijan dialect as the eastern variety representative are chosen to be compared based on Greenberg’s theoretical framework (1966), considering Dryer’s word order criteria (1992) and Dabir-Moghaddam (2001;2013). The 24 typological criteria are studied in each of these two language varieties separately based on the said theoretical framework. The data are gathered through the direct interview with native speakers. The findings show that the two varieties have the same typological behavior in word order with some minus differences in three criteria: adposition type, the order of standard of comparison, marker of comparison and adjective and the order of main verb and tense-aspect auxiliary.