Daylami, also known as ''Daylamite'', ''Deilami'', ''Dailamite'', or ''Deylami'' (Persian: , from the name of the

Daylam Daylam (), also known in the plural form Daylaman () (and variants such as Dailam, Deylam, and Deilam), was the name of a mountainous region of inland Gilan, Iran. It was so named for its inhabitants, known as the Daylamites. The Church of the Ea ...

region), is an

extinct language An extinct language or dead language is a language with no living native speakers. A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group; these languages are often undergoing a process of r ...

that was one of the northwestern branch of the

Iranian languages The Iranian languages, also called the 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 langu ...

. It was spoken in northern

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

, specifically in the mountainous area in Gīlān. Parviz Natel Khanlari listed this language as one of Iranian dialects spoken between the 9th and 13th centuries.

Istakhri Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri () (also ''Estakhri'', , i.e. from the Iranian city of Istakhr, b. – d. 346 AH/AD 957) was a 10th-century travel author and Islamic geographer who wrote valuable accounts in Arabic of ...

, a medieval Iranian geographer, has written about this language, as did Al-Muqaddasi, a medieval Arab geographer, who wrote "they have an obscure language and they use the phoneme ''khe'' /x/ a lot." Abū Esḥāq Ṣābī had a similar report on people in the Deylam highlands who spoke a distinct language. According to Wilfered Madelung, in the early Islamic period the language of the Deylamites was a northwestern Iranian language. One of the characteristics of this language was an added ī sound between consonants and ā ( Lāhījān=Līāhījān, Amīrkā=Amīrkīā).Wilferd Maelung, Deylamites .

Notes

{{Talysh people Northwestern Iranian languages Languages of Iran Extinct languages of Asia Languages attested from the 9th century Languages extinct in the 13th century Caspian languages