Gemination & Digemination in Persian and Iranian Dialects

Digemination is a phonological process, which is found in some languages like Persian. Since historical surveys implied languages’ tendency to this phenomenon and, it has not been to date studied systematically in Persian, so the purpose of the present research is to introduce this phenomenon and provide some information about its characteristics. In this paper, the relation between digemination and gemination with other rules like assimilation, lenition, fortition, compensatory lengthening was investigated. The research is based on corpus consisting of 12000 data from 33 Iranian dialects gathered from dialectology books and papers. In addition to qualitative analysis, the quantitative calculation of the features frequency has been used as well. In sum, the results illustrated that: 1- digemination behaves versus gemination; 2- compensatory lengthening and insertion are the most frequent rules related to digemination; 3- digemination causes other phonological processes and 4- different classes of consonants show different behavior toward gemination as liquid> stop> nasal> glide, and this direction is versus in digemination.