a critical review of the earliest work on luri and dizfuli dialectology

Luri and dizfuli are among the persian dialects of the western iranian languages with thousands of speakers covering a large part of the northern khuzestan. the dialects, found in a number of distinct varieties, were not studied from a linguistic point of view until 1930s when j.m. unvala (1888-1961) embarked on a pioneering enterprise to study them, using linguistically relevant field work in recording the data and describing them. the researcher did his best almost a century ago in khuzestan, iran where hardly anybody had heard about words such as linguistics, phonology and/or phonetics. what he did, was a pioneering linguistic fieldwork to record the linguistic features of two regional dialects never ever studied scientifically from a linguistic point of view here in iran. unvala s contribution to modern persian dialectology: the luri and dizfuli dialects , though avant-garde in every way at that time, bears a number of conceptual as well as methodological drawbacks. the approach adopted tends to be anthropological rather than a purely linguistic one; notes are mostly lexical rather than phonological; examples are partly incomplete; transcriptions are partly wrong; at times confusing the two dialects. given the historical significance of unvala s linguistic study, this presentation is expected to shed some light on some aspects of this work not properly known to the insiders.