Abha Arabic is a dialect of Arabic (ISO 693-3: ara), belonging to the Semitic language family group, and spoken primarily in Abha city. Abha Arabic can be broadly classified as a variety of Arabic from the Arabian Peninsula group (Versteegh, 2014), and further sub-classified as a south (-west) Arabian dialect (Ingham, 1982). Abha city is the administrative capital of the province of Asir, in south-west Saudi Arabia (Figure 1). The population of Abha is approximately 290,185 and that of the Asir province is 1,601,725, according to the most recent data on the population (General Authority for Statistics, 2010). The province is named after the Asir tribe, who first inhabited Abha and the surrounding regions. The present day Abha Arabic dialect thus represents a blending of Bedouin and urban dialects. The first settlers to Abha were the Bani-Mghed tribe (an Asir tribe) followed by three additional Asir tribes (Alkam, Rabiah w Rufeda, Bani-Malik) and other nearby tribes such as the Gahtaːn, Bal-lahmir, Bal-lasmir, Shahran, Rejal Alma’, all of which had distinct dialects (Al-Azraqi, 1998). These dialects merged to varying degrees and were further influenced by urban education and mass media, which were and continue to be dominated by Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) (Al-Azraqi, 1998).1

Southern Tati is a North-Western Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. Different varieties of this language group are spoken intermittently in the northern and northwestern parts of Iran, mainly in the Qazvin, Alborz, Markazi, Tehran, Ardabil, Gilan, Zanjan, and Khorasan-e-Shomali provinces. Previous linguistic work on the language consists of multiple descriptive grammars. These include Yarshater’s (1969) analysis of multiple Tati dialects including Takestani, Chali, Eshtehardi, Xiaraji, Ebrahim-abadi, Sagz-abadi, Danesfehani, Esfarvarini, and Xozini, as well as Taheri’s (2009) and Rahmani & Rahmni’s (2021) analyses of the Takestani dialect. The variety of Southern Tati analyzed in this study is the Takestani dialect (tks, ISO 639-3). Takestani is spoken by the Tat community in the city of Takestan, known by its residents as Siayden (IPA: [sijʌˈten]). The speakers of Takestani know their dialect of the Tati language as Siaydiniji (IPA: [sijʌtiniˈd͡ʒi]), as ‘related to the residents of Siaden.’ Figure 1 shows the location of Takestan in the Qazvin province in Iran.