# A Computational Approach to Language Contact -- A Case Study of Persian

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [A Theory of Usable Information Under Computational Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10689/) (2020)
- [Finding Universal Grammatical Relations in Multilingual BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04511/) (2020)
- [ParsBERT: Transformer-based Model for Persian Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12515/) (2020)
- [Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00914/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Systematic Benchmark of Machine Transliteration Models for the Tajik-Farsi Language Pair: A Comparative Study from Rule-Based to Transformer Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02270/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We investigate structural traces of language contact in the intermediate representations of a monolingual language model. Focusing on Persian (Farsi) as a historically contact-rich language, we probe the representations of a Persian-trained model when exposed to languages with varying degrees and types of contact with Persian. Our methodology quantifies the amount of linguistic information encoded in intermediate representations and assesses how this information is distributed across model components for different morphosyntactic features. The results show that universal syntactic information is largely insensitive to historical contact, whereas morphological features such as Case and Gender are strongly shaped by language-specific structure, suggesting that contact effects in monolingual language models are selective and structurally constrained.