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Lori or Luri (Lori/ , pronounced -faloriː], [luriː) is a collection of Southwestern Iranian languages which are mainly spoken by the Lurs and Bakhtiari people in the Iranian provinces of Loristan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad and parts of Khuzestan and Esfahan province and Fars provinces. Lori is a descendant of a variant of Middle Persian and is lexically similar to modern Persian. According to the linguist Don Stillo: "Persian, Lori-Baḵtiāri and others, are derived directly from Old Persian through Middle Persian/Pahlavi". These dialects are also referred to as the “Persid” southern Zagros group. The special character of the Lori language suggests that its spreading area was Iranicized from Persia and not from Media. "Luri and Bakhtiari are much more closely related to Persian, than Kurdish." And Lori also represents a language continuum between Persian language and Kurdish language varieties, and is itself composed of three distinct languages: Loristani, Bakhtiari and Southern Lori. Traditionally, Lori has been categorised as a single language. Some scholars have stated that Lori is only a highly accented or لهجه (lahjeh) form of Persian. And, on the other hand, some researchers are supporting the division of the Lori continuum into more than one language. There do exist transitional dialects between Southern Kurdish and Lori-Bakhtiāri, and Lori-Bakhtiāri itself may be called a transitional idiom between Kurdish and Persian. SIL Ethnologue lists four Lori language dialects, *Northern Lori [lrc], ca. 1,500,000 speakers as of 2001 *Bakhtiari [bqi], ca. 2,300,000 speakers as of 2001 *Southern Lori [luz], ca. 875,000 speakers as of 1999 *Kumzari [zum], spoken in the Musandam Peninsula of northern Oman, ca. 1,700 speakers as of 1993. |