Investigating the Phoneme Elision Process in Dari Persian Dialect of Rustaq, Afghanistan

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the phoneme elision process in the Dari Persian dialect of the Rustaq district. Rustaq Persian dialect is one of the Dari Persian dialects that has been prevalent in this country since the distant past years. Today, investigating the phoneme elision process in various dialects has been the focus of many researchers; but no research can investigate the elision process in Rustaq Persian dialect yet. This problem encouraged the writer to investigate the phoneme elision process in the Rustaq Persian dialect by using the synchronic approach. This research has been done by descriptive-analytical method and the method of collecting data has been done by field research. In this research, we have interviewed 54 residents of Rustaq district. We analyzed the data after transcribing and categorizing. The findings of this research show that the people of Rustaq continuously omit some phonemes in their informal speech. Among the consonants in the elision process, the contribution of glottal-fricative consonant /h/ and glottal-plosive consonant /ʔ/ are more than other consonants. Among the vowels, short vowels are often exposed to the elision process. Elision of consonants mostly occurs in the boundary of two morphemes and at the end of the word, and elision of vowels mostly occurs in the middle of the word. The number of syllables in the word is reduced in the elision of vowels.