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Stilo, Donald
Vafsi Folk Tales. Wiesbaden, Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004, 288 p., biblio., no index.
Vafsi refers to the language of people of four villages in west central Iran: Vafs, Chehreqân, Gurchân and Fark in Markazi province, and is regarded as a north-western Iranian language. It shares similarities with Ashtiyani, Amore'i and Tafreshi dialects, and has also been influenced by Taleshi and some central Iranian dialects. Actually, it is believed that Vafsi is a mixture of Tati and the Iranian central dialects, and due to the special geographic situation of Vafs, it has kept many of its basic historical characteristics. The first studies on this dialect were carried out in the 1950s by M. Moghaddam, but the major scientific and systematic studies of this dialect belong to Donald Stilo, the editor of the current book.
Vafsi Folk Tales is a collection of 24 stories, which were collected by the British Iranist, L. P. Elwell-Sutton in 1958, and have been transcribed, translated and annotated by Donald Stilo. The dialect of Vafsi used in these tales is Gurchani (which is referred to as G-Vafsi in the book). After an introduction about the history of the project on Vafsi and the methodology used for this study, the tales have been presented, and the translation of each sentence of them appears in the opposite page. Also, annotations to each story follow the bulk of the tales. The book has a grammatical sketch of Vafsi, along with a glossary of the words used in the tales. This book is supplemented by two CDs, which provide the pronunciation of the tales.
Vafsi Folk Tales is a very important contribution to Iranian dialectology, and calls for further research in other less known Iranian languages. It is the first work of series that Stilo envisions about Vafsi, including A Grammar of Vafsi, and additional Vafsi texts, a full lexicon of Vafsi, a description of the historical origins and linguistic affiliations of this language, and a fuller volume on the Tatic language family, which includes the historical-comparative materials on Vafsi.

