Kholosi is an

Indo-Aryan language The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...

spoken in two villages in southern

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

that was first described in 2008. At its current status, the language is considered

endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and in ...

. In 2008, it was only spoken in the neighboring villages of Kholus and Gotav. As it is located on the

Iranian Plateau The Iranian plateau or Persian plateau is a geological feature in Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. It comprises part of the Eurasian Plate and is wedged between the Arabian Plate and the Indian Plate; situated between the Zagros ...

and surrounded by

Iranian languages The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian languages are groupe ...

, it draws heavily from them.

Classification

Kholosi is definitively known to be an

albeit with significant lexical borrowing from

given its geographical location. At the lexical level, it seems to share vocabulary largely with the

Sindhi languages The Sindhi languages or Sindhic are Sindhi and those Indo-Aryan languages closest to it. They include some varieties traditionally considered to be Gujarati: Lasi and Sindhi Bhil are sometimes added, but are commonly considered dialects of S ...

, which are the source of other Indo-Aryan migrations to the Middle East such as

Luwati Luwati (Al-Lawatia, ar, اللواتية, translit=al-lawātiyya; also known as Khoja, Khojki, Lawatiyya, Lawatiya, or Hyderabadi) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 5,000 to 10,000 people known as the Lawatiya (also called the Khojas or Hydera ...

Oman Oman ( ; ar, عُمَان ' ), officially the Sultanate of Oman ( ar, سلْطنةُ عُمان ), is an Arabian country located in southwestern Asia. It is situated on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and spans the mouth of ...

Phonology

While no published phonology has been found on Kholosi, the following phonology has been constructed from examples provided in the sources below. Kholosi also contains the diphthongs /ɑi, ɑw, ow/ and possibly others. ''Note*'': The phonemes marked with an asterisk are assumed based on the structure of the attested phonemes.

Grammar

Anonby and Bahmani (2013) made some brief notes on Kholosi grammar, but so far no grammatical sketch nor a full grammar of the language has been documented.

Morphology

Nouns and noun phrases

Nouns have inherent

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

, and adjectives agree in gender with the head noun. Attributive

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

s follow the head noun, unlike other Indo-Aryan languages. Numerals precede the head noun.

Verbs and verb phrases

Kholosi uses several

light verb In linguistics, a light verb is a verb that has little semantic content of its own and forms a predicate with some additional expression, which is usually a noun. Common verbs in English that can function as light verbs are ''do'', ''give'', ''have ...

s to form noun-verb compounds. This is a common feature of

Indo-Iranian languages The Indo-Iranian languages (also Indo-Iranic languages or Aryan languages) constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family (with over 400 languages), predominantly spoken in the geographical subre ...

. The adverb precedes the verb it modifies.

Case and adpositions

Kholosi has noun-suffixed

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s (e.g. the genitive marker ''-jo'' which agrees with the gender of the possessor) as characteristic of Indo-Aryan languages.

Syntax

Kholosi is a verb-final language with SOV word order.

Vocabulary

Kholosi has roughly twice the number of Indo-Aryan terms in its basic lexicon than Iranian borrowings. The primary source of Iranian borrowings is

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

, but

Larestani Achomi ( fa, اچُمی), also known as Larestani and Khodmooni, is a Southwestern Iranian Persian language spoken by people in southern Fars and western Hormozgan and by significant numbers of immigrant groups in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, ...

and Bandari (in the same geographical area) also appear to have contributed vocabulary. A high degree of similarity with Indo-Aryan languages ''Indo-Aryan vocabulary in Kholosi'' ''Kholosi Indo-Iranian vocabulary aligned with Indo-Aryan sound changes'' A significant proportion of structures shared with neighbouring Iranian languages ''Iranian vocabulary in Kholosi'' ''Words illustrating the local character of Iranian vocabulary in Kholosi'' Lack of contrastive aspiration on stops in Kholosi A full fricative series in Kholosi Lack of an implosive series in Kholosi Complex predicates in Kholosi Distinctive structures in Kholosi ''Distinctive Kholosi vocabulary''

References

Indo-Aryan languages Languages of Iran {{IndoAryan-lang-stub