Reyhan Gugunani. Folktales of the Georgians of Fereydan. Fuladshahr (Iran), Publishing House "Gorji", 2024, 300 pp.

Abstract

In the twentieth century, research on the Georgian community in Iran and its dialect was conducted predominantly by Georgian scholars. In recent decades, several noteworthy initiatives have also emerged from Georgians residing within Iran. Each newly available text in this field represents a valuable contribution to scholarship. Among these, Folktales of the Georgians of Fereydan by R. Gugunani, published in Iran in 2024, stands out as a remarkable corpus for the study of this Georgian linguistic island. According to R. Sepiani, author of the preface, the volume preserves the grammatical norms of Fereydani speech in their entirety - an achievement described as unprecedented (p. 7). The work is bilingual: ten tales are presented first in Persian and subsequently in the Fereydani dialect. The Georgian versions are notably more detailed, often including elements omitted from the Persian texts. From the standpoint of genre, The Evil Bird is the sole narrative that can be classified as an animal tale, while Kurdo, closely tied to local belief systems, resists categorization as a fairy tale in the strict sense. The Georgian texts exhibit gemination of both consonants and vowels - an atypical phenomenon in Georgian reflecting the influence of Arabic-Persian orthog-raphic conventions and the Persian phonological system. Persian is also responsible for the unusual merging of negative particles in combination with Georgian verb forms in writing. Formulaic expressions further reveal this contact: some opening and closing phrases reproduce Persian structures verbatim, while others demonstrate hybridization, such as the Georgian traditional opening formula ‘there was, and there was not one,’ which blends with the Persian yekī būd, yekī nabūd. At times, however, the Fereydani texts demonstrate distinctive closing formulas, such as ‘A lice and a cootie [let be away from you] in hills, and [let] fruit [be] in your lap. Amen!’ - a conclusion that neither parallels Persian folktale endings nor corresponds to traditional Georgian closing for-mulas. The review also identifies lexical items that appear to derive from standard Georgian rather than the Fereydani dialect, as well as Europeanisms. Gugunani argues the latter on the grounds of their frequent use in contemporary Fereydani speech. Despite certain limitations, Folktales of the Georgians of Fereydan (2024) constitutes a major new source for the study of the dialect, everyday life, and folklore of the Georgian community in Fereydan.