The Historical Study of Some Morphological Elements of Sistani Dialect

Continuous changes taking place in languages have been due to the dynamic nature of language that occurs progressively and slowly over time. In this regard, local languages and dialects change less than the standard languages. Sistani dialect is also among the dialects that has its own specific phonetic, phonological, syntactic and morphological elements and characteristics making it different from the Standard (Modern) Persian. This article while describing some morphological features of Sistani dialect in comparison to Old, Middle, Darri Persian and Avesta Language also is going to show which historical elements and features of this dialect are still being used and have been inherited from which era. The linguistic data has been collected via library and also field methods, through interviewing with old Sistani men above 60 years old and recording their free speech. Then the extracted morphological elements from Sistani dialect were compared to those of Old, Middle, and Dari Persian as well as Avesta Language. The results show that in this dialect, there are some prefixes such as /be-/, /mē-/, /na-/, /ma-/ and suffixes /-ak(a)/, non-past verb inflectional suffixes, demonstrative pronouns, /i/ and /o/, personal pronouns /to/، /o/، /mâ/ ، /šmâ/ and /ošo/, reflexive pronouns /xod/ and /xâ/, lack of bound personal and also the exsistance of the initial consonant clusters such as dr، st، fr which have originated from Old, Middle, and Dari Persian as well as Avesta language.