The Kumzari language, a critically endangered new southwestern Iranian language, is spoken by approximately 4,000 people across two distinct dialects: Laraki (spoken on Larak Island in southern Iran) and Musandam Kumzari (used in northern Oman’s Musandam Peninsula and parts of the UAE). The geographic positioning of Kumzari speakers along one of the world’s most strategic economic and political crossroads has drawn Western scholarly attention to this community and their language over the past two centuries.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, observers like Whitelock (1838), Palgrave (1866), Ross (1874), and Zwemer (1902) encountered Kumzari speakers in Musandam and Larak but erroneously dismissed the language as an “incomprehensible Arabic dialect.”

It was Atmaram Jayakar (1902) who first affirmed Kumzari’s Iranian origins in an appendix to a study on the Shihhi Arabic dialect, followed by Bertram Thomas (1930), whose 70-page article compiled Kumzari vocabulary, phonetics, and grammar. Their work became the cornerstone of Kumzari studies for decades. Notably, O.P. Trevor’s unpublished research, later accessed by Georg Morgenstierne (1927), provided early lexical data, which Morgenstierne used to analyze a Pashto word—marking the first detailed examination of Kumzari vocabulary.

Subsequent scholars, including Harold Bailey (1931, 1933), David MacKenzie (1967), Johnny Cheung (2007), and Martin Schwartz (2012), expanded on these foundations, conducting etymological studies of Kumzari words. By the mid-20th century, linguists like Morgenstierne (1958), I.M. Oranskij (1963), Prods Oktor Skjærvø (1989), and V.S. Molchanova (1997) reanalyzed Kumzari within the southwestern Iranian language family, addressing phonological, morphological, and syntactic ambiguities in earlier works and correcting errors in Jayakar and Thomas’s data.

In the 21st century, renewed efforts to document Kumzari language emerged. Scholars such as Christina van der Wal Anonby and Saeed al-Jahdhami conducted fresh fieldwork, while Erik Anonby, Pakzad Yusofian, and Azita Afrashi contributed analyses of specific linguistic features. Despite progress, Kumzari’s endangered status underscores the urgent need for comprehensive, culturally sensitive research to preserve this unique new southwestern Iranian language and its dialects.

During this period, the Laraki dialect of Kumzari (spoken on Larak Island, Iran), which had not been fully or systematically documented, was comprehensively recorded by S.A.M. Asghari (2021).

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