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In many passages of the royal inscriptions, the Elamite morphology or word order corresponds closely to the Old Persian, departing from what historical Elamite grammar would call for: e.g. u Pirtiya [Kuraš šakri] Kanbuziya igiri “I (am) Bardiya [Cyrus' son], Cambyses' brother” (DB Elamite i 29f.), corresponding to Old Persian adam Bṛdiya ami haya Kurauš puça Kambujiyahyā brātā (DB OP i 39f.); Kammadda akka makuš (DB Elamite i 48 and passim), corresponding to Old Persian Gaumāta haya maguš (DP Old Persian i 44 and passim) (Reiner 1960).

These passages have long been understood as calques that arose from an underlying editorial procedure in which a text conceived and dictated in a current form of Old Iranian was rendered both in Elamite translation and in Old Persian, with occasional changes of editorial nuance between the versions. When the Achaemenid Elamite administrative documents first came under study, they were similarly understood as texts in “translation Elamite” (Cameron 1948: p. 19), implying that the editorial procedure of the royal inscriptions was mirrored in the administrative procedure of the archive keepers. The extreme form of this view was the thesis of “alloglottography” by which the Elamite texts are mechanical representations of underlying Persian texts, dictated in Persian and read out in Persian by users who neither wrote nor spoke Elamite (Gershevitch 1979, 1987; modified by Rubio 2007: pp. 33–40). Implicit in such views was the idea that around the Achaemenid courts language was a primary and exclusive identifier, that most speakers and especially most writers of Elamite, Persian, and Aramaic belonged to distinct groups, that subject Elamites wrote documents for Persian masters.

Such views have been aptly criticized on several grounds, including these:

They are inconsistent with Achaemenid Elamite grammar, especially as attested in the administrative texts: even in sentences where calques on Iranian possessive, attributive or other constructions are present, Elamite sentence order differs from the Iranian counterpart (Yakubovich 2008: 207); apparent calques on Iranian constructions found in the royal inscriptions are productive constructions in the administrative texts; transcribed and loaned Iranian words include no verbal forms, and almost no non‐enclitic pronouns or prepositions; Elamite words are not given Iranian case‐endings, and most transcribed Iranian words do not have grammatically meaningful case‐endings; variations cannot be understood as different “translations” of similar underlying constructions

(Henkelman 2011a: pp. 588–592, 617–622).

They are inconsistent with the use of written languages at Persepolis and elsewhere, where individual scribes were literate in more than one language

(Tavernier 2017: pp. 353–355).

They are historically implausible: speakers (and writers) of Neo‐Elamite and speakers of Iranian vernaculars were in close contact, occupying the same territories, for at least several generations before the emergence of the Achaemenid Empire

(Henkelman 2011a: pp. 594–595).

Achaemenid Elamite, as these critics cogently argue, is not an encoding of Old Iranian but a development of older Elamite affected by long contact with Iranian vernaculars, leading to a partial restructuring of the grammatical system. The restructuring favored formal similarity between Elamite and Iranian expression, modifying or creating Elamite constructions that paralleled Iranian word‐order, morphology, and semantic distinctions (Yakubovich 2008: p. 207; Henkelman 2011a: pp. 588, 593, 594).

Grammatical and lexical variations indicate that most, but perhaps not all, writers of Achaemenid Elamite were native speakers of Iranian vernaculars who acquired Elamite as a second, written language and, for most, as a spoken language. Thus, the syntax of the Elamite administrative texts reflects a range of variation between extremes of preference for older Elamite grammatical constructions and for constructions that mimic Old Iranian syntax or morphology. Like the use of Elamite month names instead of transcribed Iranian month names (Hallock 1969: pp. 74–75), and use of Elamite synonyms for Iranian words, some of these choices were geographically conditioned. The Elamite options appear mostly in texts written to the northwest of Persepolis, along the route to Susa, suggesting the survival of Elamite as a native language, or at least the survival of proficiency in historical Elamite grammar and resistance to Iranian‐influenced restructuring, in the region of later Elymais and the territories of the Ouxioi (Henkelman 2011a: p. 586, 2011b: pp. 8–11).

Comparable but less wide variation is discernible in the Elamite royal inscriptions. For example, in rendering the common royal title “king of kings,” inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes from Susa exhibit a strong (but not exclusive) preference for a historical Elamite possessive‐attributive construction (sunkir sunkip(ir)ra, e.g. DSc, DSd, DSi, DSz, but not DSe) while inscriptions of the same kings from Persepolis and nearby exhibit a strong (but not exclusive) preference for another Elamite construction (sunkir sunkip(in)na, e.g. DPa, DPf, DPh, XPa, XPb, XPc, but not DNa) that corresponds more closely to the order and morphology of the Old Persian counterpart (xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām).

A few passages in royal inscriptions imply an audience to whom the interplay of languages was meaningful. To appreciate the nuance and coherence of the suite of Persepolis Foundation inscriptions DPd‐DPg, for example, the ancient observer or his guide had to be literate in all the versions. Again, when Darius and Xerxes quoted the anticipated thoughts of the readers of Elamite versions, the thoughts were rendered once as transcribed Persian (dayawišmi tarma ašdu [representing dahyāušmai duruvā *astu] “my land, be safe,” DB Elamite iii 65), once translated into Elamite (appa hamak dayawiš hube appa Dariyamawiš sunkir marrišda “how made(?) (are) those lands that king Darius held,” DNa Elamite 33f.), and once partially transcribed and partially paraphrased in Elamite (šada hanu [representing Persian šiyāta ahani] katukda “‘may I be happy’ (while) you live” XPh Elamite 39). Darius and Xerxes expected the audience for their words not only to read and hear but also to think in Persian and Elamite together.