Dialectal Layers in West Iranian: a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Approach to Linguistic Relationships

Abstract: This paper addresses a series of complex and unresolved issues in the historical phonology of West Iranian languages. The West Iranian languages (Persian, Kurdish, Balochi, and other languages) display a high degree of non-Lautgesetzlich behavior. Most of this irregularity is undoubtedly due to language contact; we argue, however, that an oversimplified view of the processes at work has prevailed in the literature on West Iranian dialectology, with specialists assuming that deviations from an expected outcome in a given non-Persian language are due to lexical borrowing from some chronological stage of Persian. It is demonstrated that this qualitative approach yields at times problematic conclusions stemming from the lack of explicit probabilistic inferences regarding the distribution of the data: Persian may not be the sole donor language; additionally, borrowing at the lexical level is not always the mechanism that introduces irregularity. In many cases, the possibility that West Iranian languages show different reflexes in different conditioning environments remains under-explored. We employ a novel Bayesian approach designed to overcome these problems and tease apart the different determinants of irregularity in patterns of West Iranian sound change. Our methodology allows us to provisionally resolve a number of outstanding questions in the literature on West Iranian dialectology concerning the dialectal affiliation of certain sound changes. We outline future directions for work of this sort.