¹ Zellig S. Harris, Methods in structural linguistics 13 (Chicago, 1951).

² Ibid. 11.

³ Lg. 28.498 (1952).

⁴ Lg. 24.7 (1948).

⁵ George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith Jr., An outline of English structure 85-8 (Norman, 1951).

⁶ Speakers (tutors in the School of Languages, Foreign Service Institute) include the following: Kambiz Yazdan-Panah (Y), Fereidun Khajenouri (KN), Abraham Pourhadi (P), Mohamad Javad Meimandi-Nejad (MN), Fereidun Azerbeygui (A), Yadollah Nabil (N), Ataollah Zaiany (Z), Rahim Moezie, and Mehrdad Garzan. Identifying initials are used in the text. To all of them, and to others unnamed, I wish to express my thanks for their enthusiastic cooperation. Many of the examples used here are from the Foreign Service Institute's textbook Spoken Persian, which they helped to prepare.

⁷ These trips were made under the auspices of the Foreign Service Institute, Department of State.

⁸ L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Colloquial Persian (London, 1943), has material in what is (judged on the basis of ST) a mixture of formal and informal. It is the only printed book which gives any extended presentation of informal material, even though the beginner cannot distinguish the informal from the formal. Ann K. S. Lambton, Persian grammar 172-3 (Cambridge, 1953), has a brief and totally inadequate section on the informal, which she calls Colloquial Persian. (She has, however, a disclaimer on p. xi to avoid criticism on this point.) Reuben Levy, The Persian language 9-10 (London, 1951), carefully defines the ‘Persian Language’ to include only what we here call the formal. It is in most respects a good definition of the formal.

G. Lazard, Grammaire du persan contemporain (Paris, 1957), which includes both formal and informal variants, was not available to me until after this article had been submitted for publication.

⁹ Herbert H. Paper and Mohammad Ali Jazayery, The writing system of Modern Persian (Washington, 1955), follow the phonemic system used here as regards linear phonemes. The few changes necessary to convert Paper's transcription were made, with his permission, by Jazayery and the present author in order to make it uniform with the Foreign Service Institute's Spoken Persian. It is interesting to observe that this phonemic transcription, arrived at by observation of speech, has a neater, more regular correspondence to the traditional orthography than have those of other scholars.

¹⁰ Lambton, op.cit. 260-5, treats intonation, though not phonemically.

¹¹ The substandard speech of Tehran, called to my attention by Peter Avery of that city, is still a wide-open area for linguistic research.

¹² Abd-ul-Ghafûr Farhâdi, Le persan parlé en Afghanistan: Grammaire du Kâboli (Paris, 1955).

¹³ J. Christy Wilson Jr., An introduction to colloquial Kabul Persian (Monterey, 1956).

¹⁴ I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Farhadi, Dr. Abdul Wardakee, Dr. Wilson, and the many others who helped me with my study of the language while I was in Kabul. Dr. Wardakee provided nearly all the basic material used. Dr. Farhadi very kindly spent hours with me going over material and discussing linguistic matters.

¹⁵ Compound verbs are in close juncture in the informal.

¹⁶ The use of I /o/ for F /a/ was also noted. This is a dialect variant.

¹⁷ For an ethnolinguistic discussion of politeness levels, see Ismael Silva-Fuenzalida, El uso de los morfemas ‘formales’ y ‘familiares’ en el español de Chile, Boletín de filología 8.439-55 (1954-5). For ‘style’ in the classic sense see D. C. Phillott, Higher Persian grammar 629-72 (Calcutta, 1919).

¹⁸ William Jones, A grammar of the Persian language ⁸ 135 (London, 1823).