The Extinct Language of Gurgan: Its Sources and Origins (Report‪)‬

One of the poorly studied Iranian languages is Gurgani, the extinct language of Gurgan, the Persian province at the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea. Gurgan is situated north of the Alburz watershed and consists of the broad plains and valleys watered by the rivers Gurgan and Atrak. Throughout history, the provincial capital of Gurgan was the city of Gurgan; under the Safavids, however, the southwestern town of Astarabad gained prominence, and the province itself was constituted as that of Astarabad. The town of Astarabad was renamed Gurgan under Reza Shah Pahlavi, while the old town of Gurgan corresponds to the site of the present Gunbad-i Qabus. Dast-i Gurgan is now designated as "Turkmen Sahara" on the map, and, just to add to the confusion, the province itself has recently been renamed Gulistan "rose garden," apparently after the trend in the Islamic Republic to replace toponyms that sound pagan, in this case gurgan "wolves." The only known extant documents in the Gurgani language are those associated with the Hurufi sect of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Hence, Gurgani must have died out sometime after the fifteenth but certainly before the nineteenth century, for European travelers do not report anything distinctive about the language of Gurgan. The language shift came about through social and commercial interactions that affected the entirety of Iranian languages all over the plateau and ousted the dialects south of the Great Khurasan Road as well as Gurgani north of the Alburz.