The Semnani languages or Komisenian languages are a group of
Northwestern Iranian languages
The Western Iranian languages or Western Iranic languages are a branch of the Iranian languages, attested from the time of Old Persian (6th century BC) and Median.
Languages
The traditional Northwestern branch is a convention for non-Southweste ...
, spoken in
Semnan province (only 68,700 native speakers in 2019) of
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 ...
that share many linguistic features and structures with
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 ...
. These languages are also called "dialects" in some sources. The Semnani languages are descendants of the extinct
Parthian whereas the Caspian languages are descended from the extinct
Median
The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “ ...
.
There are six Semnani languages named in the literature. Some may be dialects, but there is little published work on their relationships.
*
Semnani (incl. one of several dialects termed 'Biyabunaki')
*
Sangsari
*
Sorkhei
*
Aftari
*
Lasgerdi
Cognate sets[Lecoq, pg. 310.]
Notes
Bibliography
*
*
Northwestern Iranian languages
{{Iran-stub