منطقه وفس

Ph.D. in Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

Donald Stilo received his B.S. from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in Russian and French (1963) and his M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) from the University of Michigan in Theoretical Linguistics with a concentration on Iranian languages

Since the early 1960's, he has concentrated on fieldwork in Iran and has also focused on linguistic areal phenomena in the languages of Northern Iran and the South Caucasus. For the past four and a half years, Stilo has been working on the Northwest Iranian Languages Project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The project has involved yearly fieldtrips to the Republic of Azerbaijan to work on the Talyshi language spoken there

Donald Stilo recently published Vafsi Folk Tales (Reichert Verlag, 2004) and Modern Persian: Spoken and Written, Volumes 1 and 2 (Yale University Press, 2005), a two-volume textbook for the instruction of first-year Persian.Other recent publications include articles on the syntax and areal features of various Western Iranian languages

Stilo is currently preparing a reference grammar of Vafsi, a Tati language spoken in four villages to the southwest of Tehran

Stilo is now concentrating on a project in which he investigates and documents the Araxes Sprachbund in Southern Caucasus and Northern Iran, an area where languages from five different language families and two stocks of Indo-European show intensive linguistic convergence features. His main focus within the Araxes project during this academic year will be on the mutual influence of Turkic and Iranian languages on the synchronic level as exemplified by Talyshi and Azerbaijani Turkish, as well as on the diachronic perspective in examining the non-Persian Iranian substratum of Azerbaijan