Narrative Analysis of The Kurdish Personal Narratives

Abstract

This study investigates the similarities and difference between the English and Kurdish conversational stories told by Iraqi Kurdish bilingual speakers. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data (20 hours audio-taped conversational stories told by five Kurdish bilingual speakers in Kurdish and English), the self representation of the Kurdish speakers was examined through emphasizing the ways in which the moral stance dimensions of the personal narratives are enacted in the Kurdish conversational stories by using Labov (1972) and Ochs and Capps’s (2001) models of narrative analysis. The quantitative analysis demonstrates that the Kurdish narrators almost use the same range of the evaluative devices in both the Kurdish and English stories, but that they employ these with a varying extent. This variation has provided the start point to identify the moral positioning by Kurdish bilingual speakers. The moral positioning in this study prompts a range of distancing between the protagonists. The distancing identified was Kurdish-Arabic. This indicated the racial tension between Kurds and Arabs, nominating the Kurdish ethnic identity.