Tati language (Iran)
Some sources use the term Old Azeri to refer to the Tati language as it was spoken in the region before the spread of Turkic languages, and is now only spoken by different rural communities in Iranian Azerbaijan (such as villages in Harzanabad area, villages around Khalkhal and Ardabil), and also in Zanjan and Qazvin provinces.In many new Iranian languages, verb affixes have been left almost unnoticed, and it will be possible, by the act of deriving roots, to clear up most of their structural and semantic ambiguities.In the field of phonetics Tati is similar to the rest of the north-western Iranian languages: it is distinguished by the persistence of Iranian *z, *s, *y-, * v- against the south-western d, h, j-, b-; development /ʒ/ < * j, */t͡ʃ/ against the south-west z, and the preservation of intervocalic and postvocalic *r and even, for a number of dialects, development rhotacism.Khalkhali Tati is distinguished from other dialects producing ergative structures, because of the adherence of verb to semantic object, in number, person and specially in gender.Vafsi is a dialect of Tati language spoken in the Vafs village and surrounding area in the Markazi province of Iran.Nouns are inflected for gender (masculine, feminine), number (singular, plural) and case (direct, oblique).It is spoken in the village of Xoin and surrounding areas, about 60 kilometres (37 mi) southwest of Zanjan city in northern Iran.However, the dialect has its own special characteristics such as continuous present which is formed by the past stem, a preverb shift, and the use of connective sounds.The past and present stems are irregular and shaped by historical developments, e.g.: wuj- / wut- (to say); xaraš-/xarat- (to sell); taj-/tat- (to run).The imperative is formed by the modal prefix be- if the verb contains no preverb, plus the present stem and without ending in the singular and with -ân in the plural.be- is often changed to bi-, bo- or bu- according to the situation, and appears as b- before a vowel of a verbal stem.It is spoken in the villages around Kilit, located 12 kilometers southwest from the city of Ordubad in a district with the same name of Nakhchivan in Azerbaijan.This claim is supported by focusing on linguistic characteristics of Tati and Talysh, the history of the interrelation between the two languages, geographical parameters of the area, as well as the phonological, morphological, and lexical examples.