Peykāni: a Central Iranian Dialect in the Jarquya District

Peykāni is a variety of Central Iranian dialects spoken in the village of Peykān (locally Peykom) in Jarquya district of Isfahan province in central Iran. It shares features with other Central dialects in the Southern branch such as Gazi, Sedehi, and Isfahani Jewish. This paper describes synchronic and historical phonology and grammar of Peykāni based on a corpus collected by the authors in Peykān village during winter 2019. The study of phonology of the dialect as presented in the current paper shows that Peykāni basically has Northwestern features and in later changes, it shares some features with other Central dialects but also shows features that are specific to Peykāni. In morpho-syntax features, Peykāni coincides with the Southern branch of Central dialects as it has no grammatical gender, passive stem, or future tense that separates it from the rest of Northeastern Central dialects in the Kashan region. By having some new grammatical features such as a new form for definiteness or imperfect suffix, Peykāni has specific features not seen in other Central dialects.