Sociolinguistics

The present chapter is an overview of sociolinguistic studies in the Persian-speaking territory with an emphasis on Iran and is divided into two general parts. In the first part, different aspects of Persian sociolinguistics are discussed at the macro level and issues such as dialect studies, and language contact in the Persian-speaking area are briefly reviewed. In the second part, some issues such as social variations in Persian, change in progress and standard varieties of Persian are briefly analysed at the micro level. The main focus of this chapter therefore, is on language diversity in a multilingual area in general, and social and regional variations in the Persian-speaking area in particular.