Afshar or Afshari is a Turkic dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan by the Afshars. Ethnologue and Glottolog list it as a dialect of the South Azerbaijani language. The Encyclopædia Iranica lists it as a separate Southern Oghuz language. According to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam: "Linguistically, Afshārī is classified as a dialect belonging to the South Oghuz group of Turkic languages (southwestern branch of Turkic) (Johanson, History of Turkic, 82–3), or else as a dialect of South Azerbaijani (Azeri). As they were embedded in a Fārsī-speaking environment, however, in many cases Fārsī became the mother tongue of the Afshārs. Other groups became bilingual (as in Kirmān). Additionally, the contact between the different languages seems to have transformed the original dialect (cf. Johanson, Discoveries, 14–6). In 2009 a linguistic comparison of different Afshār groups remains outstanding." Afshar is distinguished by many loanwords from Persian and a rounding of the phoneme to, as occurred in Uzbek. In many cases, vowels that are rounded in Azerbaijani are not rounded in Afshar. An example of this is (meaning 100), which is in standard Azerbaijani. According to Lars Johanson, emeritus professor of Turcology and linguistics at the University of Mainz, and Eva Csato, professor emeritus in Turkic languages at Uppsala University, state that the Afshar dialect as SWS; Southwestern South Oghuz group that includes the dialects of Iran (such as Kashkay, Sonqori, Aynallu, etc.) and Afghanistan (e.g., Afshar).

Literature