Curriculum vitae

Curriculum vitae
Record of studies:
General linguistics at Summer Institute of Linguistics, High Wycombe, England. July
- September 1978.
Persian studies at Tehran University, Iran. September 1979 - September 1980.
B. A. in Iranian languages Uppsala University, 1983.
Ph. D. studies in Iranian languages at Uppsala University. Defence of Ph. D. thesis:
December 1989.
Present position:
Professor of Iranian Studies, Uppsala University, 2005-
Editorial work:
Orientalia Suecana (with colleagues at the Dept. of Linguistics and Philology,
Uppsala University)
Studia Iranica Upsaliensia (with Bo Utas)
Field studies and teaching in Iran:
Pakistan, Quetta and Karachi, Nov. 1986 - Jan. 1987.
Pakistan, Quetta and Karachi, Nov. April - May 1988.
Pakistan, Quetta and Karachi, May 1994.
Iran, Zahedan, Dec. 1997.
Iranian Balochistan, Feb-March 2005.
Iranian Balochistan, Feb-March 2006.
Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan (northern provices of Iran), Nov. 2006.
Iranian Balochistan, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Teaching phonology, Feb-
March 2007.
University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Teaching phonology, February-March 2008.
University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Teaching phonology, March 2010.
Research projects:
Exchange programme between Iranian Languages, Uppsala University and
Turkology, University of Mainz, 1993 - 2000. Financed by SI - DAAD.
Languages in contact and conflict in West Asia (Språklig mångfald i samarbete och
konflikt i Västasien, 1998-2002. Financed by The Swedish Research Council

(Vetenskapsrådet), Stockholm, Sweden. Head of project.
Language, identity and society – a documentation of minority language in Iran, their
sociolinguistic milieu and the role of the language in individual and group identity. In
cooperation with the Department of English and Linguistics, University of Sistan and
Balochistan, Iran. Financed by the Swedish Research Council-SIDA, Swedish
Research Links. Head of projects. 2007-2010.
Documentation of the language and lifestyle of the Galesh, province of Golestan, Iran
Documentation project PPG0043. Pilot project financed by Endangered Languages
Documentation Project, SOAS, London. Together with Guiti Shokri and Hossein
Barani.
Symposium and workshop organisation:
Symposium on the Balochi language, Uppsala, May 1997.
Presentation: Language maintenance and language attitudes among Baloch in
Sweden.
2nd international symposium on the Balochi language, Uppsala, 17-20 Aug. 2000.
Presentation: The case system in Iranian Balochi from a contact linguistic perspective.
3rd international conference with focus on Balochistan: Pluralism in Balochistan,
Uppsala, 18-21 Aug. 2005.
Presentation: Relative clauses in Balochi and the marking of the antecedent. Influence
from Persian
Workshop on research methods in phonetics with a particular aim towards researchers
and students from Iran. In cooperation with Dr. Pétur Helgason, Dept. of Linguistics
and Philology, Uppsala University. To be held in Uppsala, 13-16 August 2007.
Languages and dialects in Iran. International conference on documentation of
minority languages in Iran and their sociolinguistic milieu. In cooperation with the
University of Sistan and Balochistan, Zahedan, Iran, and other international
researchers. Zahedan 28-31 October 2008.
Presentation: Hypotactic constructions in spoken and written Balochi.
FLEX (Field Works Language Explorer)
Workshop I in Uppsala, April 2009 (led by Daniel Paul, SIL International)
Workshop II in Uppsala, April 2010 (led by Ron Lockwood, SIL International)
Participation in other international conferences and workshops than those
organised by myself (see above):
Types of Evidentiality in Turkic, Iranian ande Neighbouring Langauages, held at the
Swedish Research Intitute in Istanbul, April 1997. Organisers: Lars Johanson and Bo
Utas.
Presentation: Indirectivity in spoken Modern Persian.

Areas of Iranian-Semitic-Turkic Convergence. Linguistic Contact in Western and
Central Asia in Past and Present. held at Uppsala University 18-20 May 2001.
Organisers: Eva Csato Johanson and Bo Isaksson.
Presentation: The glottal plosive in Persian. Semitic influence
Culture and Society in West and Central Asia – The role of the State, held at the
Swedish Research Intitute in Istanbul, 14-16 November 2002. Organisers: Annika
Rabo and Bo Utas.
Presentation: State control and language in Balochistan
The Second International Conference on Language Variation in Europe. Uppsala
University, June 12-14, 2003. Organisers: Britt Louise Gunnarsson et al.
Presentation: Language maintenance among Iranian immigrants in Sweden.
The Second International Conference on Iranian Linguistics, Leipzig June 2005.
Organisers: Donald Stilo, Sima Karimi, Vida Samiian.
Presentation: Expressions of future in Persian
Workshop on Documentation of Iranian Linguistics, Kiel Aug. 2007.
Organiser: Geoffrey Haig
Presentation: Documentation of Balochi, an overview.
International Conference of Larestan Philology and Ethnology, organised by the
Municipality and Islamic Council of Lar, Iran. 14-15 March 2009.
Individual presentation: On u-fronting in languages and dialects of southern Iran
Presentation with Maryam Nourzaei (by Maryam Nourzaei): Observations on the
language and ethnography of the Koroshis in Fars.
Iranian linguistics, Ferdowsi University, Mashhad, 24-25 Feb 2010 (absent).
Presentation together with Maryam Nourzaei (by Maryam Nourzaei): Ergativity in
Koroshi.
Supervision of Ph.D. projects:
Completed:
Forogh Hashabeiky. Persian Orthography. Modification or Changeover (1850-
2000). Defended in April 2005. Assistant supervisor.
Helena Bani-Shoraka. Language Choice and Code-Switching in the Azerbaijani
Community in Iran. Defended in June 2005. Main supervisor. This thesis received the
Westin prize of best Ph.D. thesis in the “philological class” of the year from the
Kungliga Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet in Uppsala.
Serge Axenov, The Balochi Language of Turkmenistan. A corpus-based grammatical
description. Defended in Jan. 2007. Main supervisor.
Dariush Kargar. Iranian conceptions of the Other World. Defended in Jan. 2010. Main

supervisor.
Ongoing:
Behrooz Barjasteh Delforooz. A comparative study of the verbal system of Brahui
and Balochi as spoken in Iranian Sistan. Main supervisor.
Behrooz Shojai. Ergativity in Kurmanji. Main supervisor.
Anders Widmark. Pashto short story writing. Main supervisor.
Farhad Shakely. Personal background Classical Kurdish Poetry (Mala-yē Jazīrī).
Main supervisor.
Padideh Pakpour. Identity and language in Rasht. Main supervisor.
Farideh Okati. The vowel system in Balochi. A phonetic-phonological study.
Assistant supervisor.
Mojgan Seraji. Computational linguistics. Assistant supervisor.
Supervision of MA-theses in Iran
Farideh Okati. Sistani Phonology. Spring 2008. University of Sistan and Baluchestan,
Zahedan, 2nd supervisor.
Somajeh Mohammadi. Syntactic errors in L2 Persian compositions by Baloch primary
school pupils in Iranshahr. Spring 2009. Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran. 2nd
supervisor.
Maryam Nourzaei: The verb system of Koroshi. A corpus based description. Autumn
2009. Shiraz Azad Islamic University of Science and Research. Defence 11 March
2010. Main supervisor.
Personal background
I grew up as the only child of quite elderly parents, who both had received only
primary education. I had no intent of pursuing my studies beyond intermediate level
when I started grade seven. However, at that time I got a teacher in English and
French who encouraged me enormously and arouse my interest in languages. I
therefore chose to continue my studies on secondary level and tried to study as many
languages as possible. During the summers of 1976 and 1977 I travelled to Europe
(France, Belgium and Spain) with an international Christian youth organisation called
Operation Mobilisation.
My first contact with Iran was indirect. In the summer of 1975 I was given a
scholarship to go to England on a language course, and the family I stayed with were
planning to go to Iran to work in the British-Iranian oil industry. They talked about
Iran for a whole month, how rich they would become etc., and the word "Iran" stayed

in my mind. The Christian youth organisation I got in touch with shortly after also
had a one- year "Language and Culture training programme" in Iran, which I planned
to attend as soon as I had finished my secondary education. I prepared myself by
studying as much as I could about Iran during my final year in High School.
My dream came true, and I went to Iran in the autumn of 1978 together with about
10 other youth from Europe and the USA. As soon as we arrived the Islamic
Revolution got underway, and it was not safe for us to stay in the country. At that
time I was very confused as to what to do, since my mind was so strongly set on
learning Persian and staying in Iran. However, God gave me a word of comfort from
Psalm 121 (the final verse) which says: "God will protect your going out and your
coming in from now and forever". The whole group went to Pakistan, and we got the
option of studying Urdu or continuing with Persian. I opted for the latter.
During my time in Pakistan I also heard about Iranian languages, related to
Persian, but spoken in Pakistan, and I started to take an interest in one of them,
Balochi. The year with the Christian youth organisation thus strongly formed the rest
of my life. After returning to Sweden I applied for a student's visa to study Persian in
Iran. It was granted and I returned to Iran in October 1979. This time I stayed in Iran
for a year, and studied Persian at a mainly closed university due to the Cultural
Revolution. I managed to acquire a fairly good proficiency in spoken Persian,
something that has been of invaluable help to me in my studies and research later on.
When the war between Iran and Iraq broke out I left Iran for good and started to
study Iranian languages at Uppsala University, Sweden. However, I have visited Iran
several times afterwards, once to meet my husband's family, once to participate in a
seminar for Persian teachers, and, more recently, several times to do field research on
Balochi, teach MA courses in Linguistics and establish contacts with universities in
Iran, particularly in Balochistan but also in Tehran, Gilan, Mazandaran, Golestan,
Semnan and Shiraz (see also reports from journeys).
Research profile:
My interest in the Baloch and Balochi made me choose a subject for my dissertation
that was related to that language. In October 1986 I and our one-year-old daughter
Maria went to Pakistan for three months. My husband came to visit us once. It was,
of course, an adventure to go to Pakistan with a small child, but fortunately enough
we were able to stay with a Swedish woman who was employed by the UN in Quetta.
I had already started studying Balochi and was during this first field trip able to build
up a network of contacts with Baloch literary men and get underway with my
dissertation work.
Since then the main part of my research has been concentrated on different aspects
of the Balochi language and literature. I have studied both structural and
sociolinguistic aspects and I have also made some studies in literature. The
sociolinguistic aspect is strong in the dissertation, which dealt with the issues of
standardisation and orthography. I have also studied language maintenance and
language attitudes, both among the Baloch and also among other ethnic groups from
Iran living in Sweden.
My studies of the grammatical structure of Balochi have been mainly concentrated
on dialects spoken in Iran and to what degree they are subject to structural influence
from Persian, a subject very little studied up to now due to the difficulties involved in
making field trips to Iranian Balochistan. First I did some preliminary studies among
Iranian Baloch in Sweden, and then, within the framework of the research project

"Languages in contact and conflict in West Asia", I have been able to go to Iranian
Balochistan myself and also to establish contact with persons helping me to record
stories, free speech etc. in different parts of Iranian Balochistan. The results of these
studies have been presented in a number of articles.
In literarure I have taken a particular interest in the relation between literature and
society. A poet whom I have paid special attention to is Gul Khan Nasir, who was
both a poet and a politician and whose poems are of a strongly nationalistic character.
I am also particularly interested in folktales, and how they mirror the society in which
they are told.
Another main orientation of my research is towards structural and sociolinguistic
aspects on New Persian and minority languages in Iran. I have studied Persian
phonology (pronunciation of the glottal plosive), and morphosyntax (marking of the
antecedent of restrictive relative clauses, syntax of the preterite versus the present
perfect verb forms). The study of relative clauses is based on a text corpus spanning
over more than 1000 years, and the studies of the glottal plosive and verb
morphosyntax are based on recordings of the spoken language.
I have also studied language maintenance and patterns of language use among
Iranian immigrants in Sweden. These studies have been presented in two different
articles, one concentrating on a the Baloch from Iran and one which compares these
findings with linguistic behaviour among speakers of Persian and Armenian. In
another article I have described linguistic behaviour in an Iranian-Swedish family
which I have studied over a prolonged time through participant observation and
interviews.
Within the framework of the project ”Language, identity and society – a
documentation of minority language in Iran, their sociolinguistic milieu and the role
of the language in individual and group identity” a network is being formed for the
study of minority languages of Iran. Apart from Balochi, we have also been able to
carry out documentation and sociolinguistic surveys in the following areas:
Mazandaran, Ziarat (in cooperation with Guiti Shokri and Hossein Barani).
Documentation of the langauge and lifestyle of cow-herding Galesh in and around
Ziarat, Mazandaran.
Koroshi in Fars (which can be regarded as a dialect, although quite a distinct one, of
Balochi) (in cooperation with Maryam Nourzaei).
Sistani (particularly phonological description) (in cooperation with Farideh Okati and
Abbas Ali Ahangar)
Kumzari, Larak Island (sociolinguistic survey) (fieldwork by Erik Anonby and
Pakzad Yousefian)
Brahui in Sistan (fieldwork by Behrooz Barjasteh Delforooz)
Jadgali in Southern Balochistan (fieldwork by Behrooz Barjasteh Delforooz and
Serge Axenov)
Semnani (sociolinguistic survey of the province of Semnan) (fieldwork by Alexander
and Mirjam Kolbitsch)