Curriculum vitae

"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)