Historic Roots of The Zaza People
Linguistic studies shows that the Zazas may have immigrated to their modern-day homeland from the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Some Zazas use the word Dimli (Daylami) to describe their ethnic identity. The word Dimli (Daylami) also describes a region of Gilan Province in today’s Iran. Some linguists connect the word Dimli with the Daylamites in the Alborz Mountains near the shores of Caspian Sea in Iran and believe that the Zaza have migrated from Daylam towards the west. Today, Iranian languages are still spoken in southern regions of Caspian Sea (also called the Caspian languages), including Sangsarī, Māzandarānī, Tātī (Herzendī), Semnānī, Tāleshī, and they are grammatically and lexically very close to Zazaki; this supports the argument that Zazas immigrated to eastern Anatolia from southern regions of Caspian Sea. Zazas also live in a region close to the Kurmanj people, who are also another Iranic ethnic group. But, historic sources such as the Zoroastrian holy book, Bundahishn, places the Dilaman (Dimila/Zaza) homeland in the headwaters of the Tigris, as it is today. This points to that the Dimila/Zaza migrated to the Caspian sea and not the other way around.
This Hypotheses however is not supported by genetics. Recent studies show the Origin of Zaza being native to eastern Anatolia and genetically indistinguishable from their Kurmanji neighbors and just linguistically connected to the South of the Caspian Sea.
Read more about this topic: Zaza People
Famous quotes containing the words historic, roots and/or people:
“The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves—in full bloom or as they fade away.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)