Sorkhei

The Sorkhei are the native people of Sorkheh, a small town on the desert edge west of Semnan, and of Aftar (Hafdar), a mountain village 25 km to its northwest, in Semnan province, Iran. Their speech, Sorkhei, is a Northwestern Iranian language of the Komisenian group, named after the ancient province of Qumis (Komisene), whose languages survive as small islands in a Persian-speaking sea around Semnan; it has two vowels Persian lacks (ö and ü) and kinship words of its own, such as dada (elder brother), dodo (elder sister) and lizi (son), and Persian speakers find it musical but very hard to learn. Sorkhei is closest to Lasgerdi, the speech of neighbouring Lasjerd, and Borjian groups the two as one Sorxei-Lasgerdi language, while older dictionaries such as Sotoudeh's list Semnani, Sorkhei, Lasgerdi and Sangesari as separate dialects; Aftari, the speech of Aftar, is a dialect of Sorkhei with Mazandarani influence. The town, called Sour locally and named for its red hills, is mentioned by the geographer Ibn Rustah around 900. About 11,000 people lived in Sorkheh and Aftar in 2016, roughly the 12,000 speakers usually cited, though many townspeople now speak mainly Persian. Sorkheh is the hometown of former president Hassan Rouhani, who said in 2018 that the language served as a code for radio operators in the Iran-Iraq War and for messages his brother relayed during the nuclear talks. The Sorkhei are culturally Persian Shia Iranians whose distinctiveness lies in their language and strong home-town identity. They are not to be confused with the unrelated dialect of Kuhmareh Sorkhi in Fars province.

Sorkheh is a desert-edge oasis town of adobe lanes, qanat-fed gardens, old water reservoirs and bathhouses, a Chehel Sotun ('forty-pillar') mosque and a Safavid caravanserai on the old Khorasan road; its gardens grow melons, pomegranates, pistachios, olives and cotton. Muharram is the high point of the year: on Ashura drum-and-cymbal mourning groups gather at the Hussainiyeh of the Martyrs, and a burning-tent ceremony recalling the burning of Imam Husayn's camp draws mourners from across the country. Aftar, high in the Alborz at 2,110 m, is a herding village of three clans and six quarters named after its old 'seven-gated' fortress, whose shepherd families take their flocks to summer pastures in Firuzkuh. Sorkhei is unwritten; town pride in the language is strong, and Sorkheh soldiers used it as a spoken radio code during the Iran-Iraq War, once warning of a chemical attack with a phrase about a shopkeeper's goods.

The Sorkhei are Twelver Shia Muslims. Muharram and Ashura mourning is the centre of communal religious life, with chest-beating and drum processions and a burning-tent ceremony at Sorkheh's Hussainiyeh of the Martyrs; they also keep Ramadan and visit local shrines such as Imamzadeh Ali and Imamzadeh Esmail at Aftar, and Sorkheh's mosques include the 200-year-old Imam Hadi mosque. No religious minorities are documented in the community, and how far younger, Persian-dominant townspeople have secularised, as many Iranians have, is unknown.

No Scripture, Jesus Film or audio recordings exist in Sorkhei, and no translation work is known; Scripture Earth has no entry for the language. All speakers read and speak Persian, so the Persian Bible, the Jesus Film and Persian Christian satellite and online media are the available resources.