Our guest today is Zia Khoshsirat. Zia is a doctoral student at UCLA, studying Linguistic Anthropology. His research interests include language ideologies, historical-sociolinguisitcs, and language documentation and revitalization, and his primary language of focus is Gilaki, an Iranian language originating from the Gilan province of Iran.

In this episode, we meet Professor Golshat Safiullina, an associate professor at the Leo Tolstoy Institute of Philology at Kazan Federal University in Kazan which is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. Professor Safiullina tells us about Tatar, including who speaks it and where it is spoken around the world. She even tells us a little about a special connection between Tatar and Indiana University.

In this episode, we meet Dr. Shahyar Daneshgar, a senior lecturer in IU’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies. Shahyar is a native Azerbaijani from Tehran, Iran who is the founder of teaching Azerbaijani at IU’s Summer Language Workshop, harkening back to 1985. Also an interesting tidbit about Shahyar, he is a gifted singer and the maestro of The Silk Road Ensemble, a critically acclaimed musical ensemble that specializes in playing music from Central Asia.

In this episode, we meet Kathryn Graber. Dr. Graber is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department in the College of Arts and Sciences as well as the Department of Central Eurasian Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. She specializes in studying issues related to language, politics, and media in and around Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia, including issues related to minority populations in this area.

In this episode, we meet Gulnisa Navaroza, a senior lecturer of Uyghur at Indiana University. Gulnisa represents a significant population of ethnic Uyghurs who live in different parts of Central Asian, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. To learn more about Uyghur, go back and listen to Episodes 6 in which we discuss the Uyghurs from the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xianxiang, China.

In this episode, Amber Kennedy Kent, Mustafa Durmaz, and Meaghan Gallegos talk about CeLCAR’s biannual Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics and reminisce about their favorite parts of ConCALLs past.

In this episode, we welcome Froozan Amir, an Afghan woman who came to the United States as a political refugee after the Soviet-Afghan war. Froozan tells us about her experience of being an ESL student in the US as well as her experience of being a mother to young Afghan American children being raised in the United States. To learn more about other Persian dialects, go back and listen to Episodes 7, 9 and 14, on Dari, Tajiki, and Farsi, respectively.

In this episode, we welcome Azadeh Aghighi, a native Persian (Farsi) speaker from Tehran, Iran who teaches Arabic at Indiana University and is working on her Ph.D. in Islamic Theology at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Azadeh will discuss with us Farsi, the Persian language spoken natively by more than 110 million people in both Central Asia and the Middle East.

After a brief pause in recording over summer break, we’re back! In this episode, we meet Malik Hodjaev, a Senior Lecturer of Uzbek in the Department of Central Asian Studies at Indiana University. Malik-aka tells us all about this Turkic language spoken by over 27 million native speakers! (Second only to Turkish as the most widely spoken Turkic language in the world.)

In this episode we meet Ben Priest, who is a PhD candidate at Indiana University working on his dissertation on Kurdish Nationalism and Islam. Ben is also the Sorani instructor at IU’s Summer Language Workshop, making him the perfect person to give us a language lesson on Sorani Kurdish!