Iranian Linguistics

versity, Frankfurt am Main. Originally more than 100 abstracts were submitted to the conference, from which 36 were selected for oral presentations and 19 for poster presentations. A number of contributors to the conference subsequently submitted their papers for publication in this issue of Orientalia Suecana, and after the reviewing process, the seven papers below were finally selected for publication. The aim of the International Conferences on Iranian Linguistics is to provide a common venue for scholars from different disciplines, such as general linguistics, Iranian studies, and comparative Indo-European studies, who share a research focus on the Iranian languages. The first ICIL conference was held in Leipzig in 2005, and thereafter it has become a biannual event, hosted in turn by the University of Ham-burg (2007), the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2009), and Uppsala University (2011). Selections from two previous conferences have been published, Ka-rimi et al. (2008) and Korn et al. (2011). This section in the 2012 issue of Orientalia Suecana thus continues a now well-established tradition of publishing a selection of state-of-the-art contributions covering a broad spectrum of topics in current Iranian linguistics. Iranian languages are spoken over a vast geographic area, stretching from the Pamir region in the northeast and across Central Asia to the Caucasus, southern Rus-sia, and eastern Turkey in the northwest. On the Iranian plateau, different languages belonging to the Iranian family are spoken all the way to the southern shores of the Persian Gulf and even across the Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula. In the southeast there are speakers of Iranian languages all the way to Sindh province in Pakistan. Studies of linguistic contact between Iranian languages and particularly Turkic, Semitic, and other Indo-European languages, e.g. languages from the Indo-Aryan family, Armenian, and Tocharian, are therefore highly rewarding. Persian has for centuries enjoyed a special position among the Iranian languages. For more than a thousand years it has been used at courts on the Iranian plateau, in Turkey, Central Asia, and India, where it developed as the vehicle of an elevated written literature. Long before that, in its Middle Persian form, it was the medium of a rich oral literary tradition as well, and oral literature has continued to play an important role in Persian in modern times. Persian was also an important lingua franca among traders along the Silk Road. There are today more than 100 million speakers