ИСТИНА

For centuries Lar, capital of Larestan county (in southern Fars, Iran), has been distinguished by its striking diversity of its linguistic and sociocultural landscape, that more than once has become the object of dialectological studies. Lari urbanolect (called also Larestani or Achomi; a branch of the southwestern Iranian languages that conserves some archaic features of Middle Persian) may be regarded as the core of dialectal continuum of Larestan that embraces Khonji, Ewazi, Bixei, Beyrami, Baladehi, and other local language varieties. Besides of Lar and Larestan (with a population, respectively, of 62,045 and of 213,920 according to the 2016-2017 Census), nowadays Lari is spoken among multiple migrant communities in major cities of Iran, Fars province, Hormozgan province, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrein. Its usage, predominantly in informal conversations, seems to be frequently limited to a restricted number of communicative situations. Lari is listed by UNESCO as one of the definitely endangered languages of Iran. Our analysis aimed to reconstruct some features of language attitudes of the Larestani community toward their vernaculars, folklore and literature, involves the local media (Milād-e Lārestān http://mldl.ir/, Evening Larestan http://www.asriran.com, Larestan Sun http://aftablarestan.ir/, New Discourse http://www.sohbateno.ir/ etc.) and blogs (first of all http://gapolap.blogfa.com/, http://achomestan.blogfa.com/). These Internet sites offer an extensive collection of news material dedicated to different cultural events concerning the Larestan language varieties, such as book launch, poetry nights, reports of Iranian linguists at various international conferences, appearance of new media channels in dialect and so on. Apart of a vital importance for the future documentation and description of these language varieties, numerous publications of proverbs, small thematic vocabularies in dialects, poems with Persian translation or even without it, meets the demand of a rather wide audience able to enjoy reading the dialect poems or at least, comprehend them. Lively debates on the sociolinguistic status of Lari (should it be considered a dialect or a language) and a keen interest to the announced introduction of native dialect/language courses at school demonstrate that the local dialects, although overshadowed by Persian, official language of the Iranian educational system, are perceived as a milestone of the local sociocultural identity.