Southern Luri

Southern Luri (لوری جنوبی) is a Southwestern Iranian language of the Luri-Bakhtiari subgroup, spoken by roughly one million people in Kohgiluyeh & Boyer-Ahmad Province, parts of Bushehr, and southern Fars in the Zagros mountains of southwestern Iran. Erik Anonby (2003) argued for treating Southern Luri as a distinct language rather than a Persian dialect on the basis of phonological developments and lexical retentions absent from standard Persian, while acknowledging a long bidirectional contact continuum with Persian to the east and Bakhtiari to the north. The traditional Boyer-Ahmadi and Mamasani varieties retain the SOV order and ergative-style past-tense agreement typical of older Iranian, alongside characteristic Luri vowel shifts (e.g. retention of historical â where Persian has shifted, and distinct treatment of post-consonantal /w/). It has no formal orthography; Persian Perso-Arabic script is used informally in poetry and social media.