Language Related Research E-ISSN: 2383-0816 https://lrr.modares.ac.ir DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 The Online Atlas of the Languages of Iran : Design, Vol. 12, No. 2, Tome 62 pp. 231-291 Methodology and Initial Results June & July 2021 Author name Academic rank, field / Department University Assistant Professor in General Linguistics, Department of Shahrekord University, 1. Mortaza Taheri-Ardali English; Shahrekord, Iran Bakhtiari Studies Research Institute Professor in Linguistics and Carleton University, Ottawa, 2. Erik Anonby French Canada Technical Manager, Geomatics Carleton University, Ottawa, 3. Amos Hayes and Cartographic Research Centre Canada (GCRC) PhD candidate in Linguistics, Carleton University, Ottawa, 4. Zahra Azin Language Documentation and Canada Revitalization Master Student in Cognitive University of 5. Zhino Ebrahimi Science, Departement of Kaiserslautern, Social Sciences Kaiserslautern, Germany Received: 25 June 2019 University of Kurdistan- 6. Ergin Öpengin Lecturer Hewlêr, KRI, Iraq Accepted: December7 2019 MA (graduate) in General 7. Noush Azarin Atabaki University of Tehran, Iran Linguistics Received inReceived revisedform: 4 December2019 Research Associate, Geomatics Carleton University, Ottawa, and Cartographic Research Centre 8. Adam Stone Canada (GCRC) Max Planck Institute for 9. Donald Stilo Scientist (retired) Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany PhD candidate in General Alzahra University, Tehran, 10. Elmira Esmaeelpour Linguistics Iran PhD (graduate) in General Payame Noor University, 11. Maryam Amani-Babadi Linguistics Tehran, Iran The University of New 12. Muhammed Ourang PhD candidate in Linguistics South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia PhD (graduate) in General Bu-Ali Sina University, 13. Elham Izadi Linguistics Hamedan, Iran Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 3:02 IRDT on Friday June 25th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــ Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 22:03 IRST on Thursday October 7th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] 1. Corresponding Author, Email: [email protected]; ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1260-6128 Language Related Research 12(2), (June & July, 2021) 231-291 Author name Academic rank, field / Department University Geomatics Researcher, Geomatics Carleton University, Ottawa, 14. Robert Oikle and Cartographic Research Centre Canada (GCRC) MA (graduate) in General Allameh Tabataba’i 15. Nawal Bahrani Linguistics University, Tehran, Iran Columbia University, New 16. Habib Borjian Research Scholar York, US Sharif University of 17. Ava Bahrami MA (graduate) in TEFL Technology, Tehran, Iran MA (graduate) in General Alzahra University, Tehran, 18. Hamideh Poshtvan Linguistics Iran Tarbiat Modares University, 19. Shiva Piryaee PhD candidate in Linguistics Tehran, Iran PhD student in Linguistics, University of Canterbury, 20. Peiman Pishyardehkordi Department of Linguistics and Christchurch, New Zealand English Language Carleton University , Ottawa, PhD candidate in Applied Canada Linguistics; 21. Parisa Sabethemmatabadi Instructor of English for Applied Algonquin College, Ottawa, Purposes Canada Assistant Professor in Ancient Iranian Languages, Persian Velayat University, 22. Shima Jaafari-Dehaghi Language and Literature Iranshahr, Iran Department MA in (graduate) General Semnan University, 23. Maryam Jalili Doab Linguistics Semnan, Iran Ferdowsi University of 24. Faranak Jamaleddin PhD candidate in Linguistics Mashhad, Iran Institute for Humanities and PhD (graduate) in General 25. Kamyar Joulaei Cultural Studies, Tehran, Linguistics Iran Islamic Azad University of MA (graduate) in General 26. Hasan Haji Shabaniyan Central Tehran Branch, Linguistics Tehran, Iran Payame Noor University, Department of Literature Assistant Professor in General 27. Jila Khanjani and Foreign Languages, Linguistics P.O. box: 193953697, Tehran, Iran PhD (graduate) in General Razi University, 28. Leila Dianat Linguistics Kermanshah, Iran Sistan va Baluchestan 29. Ali Rashidi MA (graduate) in Linguistics University, Zahedan, Iran Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 3:02 IRDT on Friday June 25th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 22:03 IRST on Thursday October 7th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] 232 The Online Atlas of the Languages … Mortaza Taheri-Ardali et al. Author name Academic rank, field / Department University Islamic Azad University of 30. Reza Rezvani Borujeni MA (graduate) in Linguistics Khomein, Iran MA (graduate) in Persian Islamic Azad University of 31. Zohreh Rahnema Language and Literature Zanjan, Iran 32. Zeinab Zamani- Shahrekord University, MA student in TEFL Gandomani Shahrekord, Iran Research Fellow in General University of Bamberg, 33. Laurentia Schreiber Linguistics Bamberg, Germany Allameh Tabataba’i 34. Negar Sherafat MA (graduate) in Linguistics University, Tehran, Iran Professor in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies; cross- Carleton University, Ottawa, 35. Jaffer Sheyholislami appointed in Linguistics, and Canada Cultural Mediation MA (graduate) in Ancient Iranian Allameh Tabataba’i 36. Mina Salehi Languages and Culture University, Tehran, Iran PhD (graduate) in General Alzahra University, Tehran, 37. Mahnaz Talebi -Dastenaei Linguistics Iran Managing Editor of 38. Ali Akbar Abedian MA (graduate) in Linguistics Publishing House, Tehran, Kasgari Iran Associate Professor in General Payame Noor University, 39. Maryam Sadat Ghiasian Linguistics Tehran, Iran Assistant Professor in General Razi University, 40. Mehdi Fattahi Linguistics Kermanshah, Iran PhD candidate in General Tarbiat Modares University, 41. Saeideh Ghandi Linguistics Tehran, Iran 42. Mojtaba Gheitasi-Doolabi PhD candidate in TEFL Ilam University, Ilam, Iran MA (graduate) in General High School English 43. Roya Kamali Linguistics Teacher, Tehran, Iran Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Associate Professor in Ancient 44. Farzaneh Goshtasb Linguistics, Department of Iranian Languages and Culture Ancient Iranian Languages and Culture, Tehran, Iran MA (graduate) in General Imam Khamenei Technical 45. Hassan Mohebbi Bahmani Linguistics Faculty, Minab, Iran MA (graduate) in General Iranian Ministry of 46. Mohammad Mohammadi Linguistics Education Assistant Professor in General Payame Noor University, 47. Ronak Moradi Linguistics, Department of Tehran, Iran Linguistics and Foreign Languages Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 22:03 IRST on Thursday October 7th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] 233 Language Related Research 12(2), (June & July, 2021) 231-291 Author name Academic rank, field / Department University PhD (graduate) in General Bu-Ali Sina University, 48. Mehrdad Meshkinfam Linguistics Hamedan, Iran Azad University of Tehran - PhD candidate in Ancient Iranian 49. Razieh Mousavi Khoo Science and Research Languages and Culture Branch, Iran MA (graduate) in General Allameh Tabataba’i 50. Arefe Nezhad Bahram Linguistics University, Tehran, Iran Assistant Professor in General Persian Gulf University, 51. Fatemeh Nemati Linguistics Bushehr, Iran Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden and Otto- 52. Maryam Nourzaei Postdoctoral Researcher Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany Carleton University, Ottawa, 53. Emily Wang MA (graduate) in Education Canada 54. Hossein Hashemi- PhD candidate in General Allameh Tabataba’i Zarajabad Linguistics University, Tehran, Iran Abstract Iran is home to a treasury of languages representing diverse language families: Iranic, Turkic, Semitic, Indic, Dravidian, Armenian, and Kartvelian, as well as sign languages. Despite valuable research carried out by Iranian and western scholars, there is still no comprehensive publication depicting the geographic distribution and linguistic status of language varieties in Iran. In order to work toward this goal, the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (www.iranatlas.net) was officially launched in 2015 as an international, online research programme. The present study opens with a historical overview of the research context and underlines the ongoing necessity of constructing such an atlas for the languages of Iran. The article then outlines the design of the Atlas, the methodology necessary to guide and organize the research project, and the results which are being generated. Specifically, we look at the Atlas bibliography, classification of Iran’s languages, the design of a set of linguistic data questionnaires, and findings from fieldwork. Selected initial research results from fieldwork in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari and Hormozgan Provinces, where the research process is most advanced, are provided in the form of linguistic data maps. Keywords : Languages of Iran, Language documentation, Language atlas, Language map, Language classification Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 3:02 IRDT on Friday June 25th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] Downloaded from lrr.modares.ac.ir at 22:03 IRST on Thursday October 7th 2021 [ DOI: https://doi.org/10.29252/LRR.12.2.8 ] 234 The Online Atlas of the Languages … Mortaza Taheri-Ardali et al. 1. Introduction Over the past decades, many efforts have been made to explore and understand the linguistic situation in Iran. However, no systematic study has been made available to the public on the basis of which a coherent picture of the country’s languages can be drawn. In order to