Judeo-Yazdi in Historical Perspective

In Yazd, the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities speak languages that belong to the Central Dialects of Iranian, while the Muslim majority speaks Yazdi Persian. This divergence raises two pivotal questions: Why do the languages of Yazd’s minorities differ from the majority language, and what insights do they offer into their origins and, possibly, the city’s earlier vernacular? Drawing on the speech of the last speaker of Judeo-Yazdi in 2017 and of multiple speakers of Zoroastrian Dari, this article examines the hypothesis that Judeo-Yazdi and Zoroastrian Dari may both represent descendants of Yazd’s pre-Persian vernacular. While they exhibit a range of phonological correspondences, their morphological similarities—most notably the procliticization of personal pronouns—offer the strongest evidence for a common inheritance. The analysis foregrounds morphological innovations as the key diagnostic for assessing the genetic relationship between these two minority languages.