TEHRAN The First Seminar on Scientific Study of Various Dialects in Iran will be held in Tehran between May 3-6 at the Presidential Club, it was announced Monday.

According to an IRNA report, Head of Iran's Conservatory for Persian Language and Literature Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel in a press conference said, "The dialects are one of the cultural wealth of any nation and we are a rich nation in this regard."

He said that the dialects are just like precious mines, but some of them are hidden and the rest are easily exposed to view. Yet, they are all worth paying close attention.

Haddad-Adel said, "Sometimes at the bed of a deep valley we encounter a certain dialect with quite a rich vocabulary and grammatical syntax which greatly surprises us.

He said that over a century ago, many foreign Iranologists and Iranian masters of the Persian language started their systematic study of the Iranian dialects.

"Also many nonscholars have entered the field of such studies at academic level, the results of whose filed studies are sometimes published," said Haddad-Adel.

The head of the Persian Language and Literature Conservatory said that the call for submission of the articles to be presented at the seminar was made in May 2000 and for the first time the top professors and researchers in this field were invited to present the outcome of their works to the secretariat of the conference.

He added that from among 100 received papers, thirty from Iran and two from Italy were chosen for presentation during the seminar.