Introduction

Abstract

The Iranian language family is the western branch of the Indo-Iranian language group which itself belongs to the Indo-European language family. As Windfuhr (2009) states, “with an estimated 150–200 million native speakers, the Iranian language family is one of the world’s major language families.” The exact number of languages in this family is unknown. However, it has been estimated to be around 86 (Eberhard et al. 2019). Although there is no definite agreement about the classification of these languages, they can be roughly divided into four major groups: Northwestern, Southwestern, Northeastern and Southeastern. These languages have several properties in common, but there are also major differences among them in terms of their sound systems, syntactic and morpho-syntactic structures. These variations provide a novel and ideal laboratory for various types of linguistic research.