Kurdish Dialects Research Articles

Molla Ahmed-i Xasi's Kurdish (Kurmancji, Zazaki) and Turkish Poems

Until today, many valuable studies on Molla Ahmed-i Xasî (1867-1951) and his works have been carried out by many people and published in different sources. However, since it is quite laborious and time-consuming to access these sources, it poses a problem for researchers and those who want to access Molla Ahmed-i Xasî's Kurdish (Kurmanji, Zazaki) and Turkish poems. We made this study with the hope that it will contribute to the solution of this problem. Our aim is to collect Molla Ahmed-i Xasî's poems in Kurdish (Kurmanji, Zazaki) and Turkish, except for his mawlid Mewlidu'n-Nabiyyi'l-Qurayshiyyî, which he wrote in the masnavi genre in the Zazaki dialect of Kurdish, in one place and to contribute to the easy access and utilization of those who want to benefit. For this purpose, we have written these poems of Molla Ahmad-i Xasî in Arabic letters on the computer for easy reading, remaining faithful to the original, and we have given the transcribed form opposite each verse. We also compared the transcripts made by different people and gave the differences and the corrections made by us in the footnotes. Thus, we have provided a more solid text of Molla Ahmad-i Xasî's Kurdish (Kurmanji, Zazaki) and Turkish poems.

Conceptual Metaphor of Measuring Time in Kurdish Language

This research is entitled (Conceptual Metaphor of Measuring Time in Kurdish Language). The study is an attempt to show the Kurdish views about measuring time as a cognitive concept, within the framework of conceptual metaphor in Kurdish language. It refers to the schema of the concept of time as place, and how the abstract concept of time appears in concrete forms (objects, movements and quantities) in Kurdish language. The data were taken from the daily speech of the speakers of the middle dialect of Kurdish. Most of the data were widespread orally and were taken from the ordinary speech of the speakers, while some of them have taken more cultural forms and have been recorded in Kurdish dictionaries. For the data analysis the study relies on schema theory, mapping, proposed by Lakoff and Johnson within the framework of the school of cognitive linguistics/semantics. Moreover, it refers to how it reflects the individual's experience (such as the main views of school of cognitive semantics) and the principle of forming a pictorial mapping of the Kurdish individual's thought system and its reflection in his speeches have been interpreted as necessary.

Emotion Recognition in Kurdish Speech from the Sorani Dialect Corpus

Given the increasing need for interactive human-computer applications, the field of employing machine learning algorithms to discern emotions from speech has seen a substantial surge in interest. While emotion recognition systems have made substantial progress in languages like German, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish, the availability of comprehensive datasets for the Kurdish language remains notably limited. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on emotion recognition in Sorani Kurdish dialect speech data, which was carefully gathered from openly available videos from the YouTube platform and categorized into four clear supposed emotions: neutral, sadness, happiness, and anger. The study applied both natural Mel Spectrogram and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features for various spectrals, followed by the classification models K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to evaluate the results. By closely examining and contrasting the results of using several methods for feature extraction, it was found that SVM obtained a higher accuracy, reaching as much as 85.57%. This is so much more than the first Kurdish emotion classification technique for the recognition of the emotion of the words.

A Multi-Feature Fusion Approach for Dialect Identification using 1D CNN

The phonological variety of Kurdish, a language with several dialects, poses a distinct problem in automatically identifying dialects. This study examines and evaluates several sound criteria for identifying Kurdish dialects: Badini, Hawrami, and Sorani. We deployed a dataset including 6,000 samples and utilized a mix of 1D convolutional neural networks (CNN) and fully connected layers to conduct the identification job. Our study aimed to assess the efficacy of different sound characteristics in accurately identifying dialects. We employed the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and other features such as the Mel spectrogram, spectral contrast, and polynomial features to extract the sound characteristics. We conducted training and testing of our models utilizing both individual characteristics and a composite of all features. Our analysis revealed that the identification task achieved excellent accuracy rates, suggesting a promising potential for success. We achieved 95.75% accuracy using MFCC combined with a Mel spectrogram. The accuracy improved by including contrast in the MFCC feature extraction process to 91.42%. Similarly, using poly_features resulted in an accuracy of 90.83%. Remarkably, accuracy reached a maximum of 96.5% when all the attributes were combined.

Cross-cultural adaptation, reliability, and validity of the vestibular rehabilitation benefit questionnaire in the central Kurdish version

Background and objectives: The vestibular rehabilitation benefit questionnaire is a new patient-reported outcome measures with psychometric properties, to assess the efficacy of vestibular rehabilitation. The present study aims to cross-culturally adapt the questionnaire into the central Kurdish dialect and to examine its psychometric properties. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted in Sulaimani city- Kurdistan Region of Iraq from March to September 2022, on 127 patients diagnosed with vestibular disorders between 18 to 79 years old. The vestibular rehabilitation benefit questionnaire Kurdish version was created through a regulated process of cross-cultural adaptation. The Kurdish participants were responded to the questionnaire, vertigo symptom scale short form and dizziness handicap inventory to assess validity of the questionnaire. The reliability of the questionnaire was assessed by randomly selecting 40 participants to repeat the questionnaire responses over a 24-hour timeline. Results: The results revealed that the ? for subscales of dizziness, anxiety, motion-provoked dizziness, quality of life and the scale of vestibular rehabilitation benefit questionnaire -total were 0.81, 0.82, 0.78, 0.77, and 0.92, respectively. The intra-class correlation coefficient was 0.96 for the questionnaire total scale; 0.97 and 0.93 for symptoms and quality of life subscales, respectively. Spearman rho correlation coefficient revealed a powerfully positive relationship between total the questionnaire and dizziness handicap inventory, and a strong positive relationship between total questionnaire and vertigo symptom scale short form. Conclusion: The vestibular rehabilitation benefit questionnaire Kurdish version is a reliable and validated patient-reported outcome measures that can be utilized for the Kurdish-speaking population.

The role of verbs in sentence depth

The research is devoted to investigate Sulaimani Central Kurdish dialect. The focus of the research is on Syntax and it is related to language meaning, because there is an overlap between Syntax and Semantics, the structure of Sentence has two sides, (Form and meaning), and verb as a main element of the Sentence plays a major role in sentence structuring. The importance of this study is rely on the previous studies, some aspects of Kurdish Syntax have been applied to the branches of (GB) theories. This study is the use of another powerful aspect and connected theories to Kurdish Syntax that is the role and power of verb in Kurdish Syntax. At this level it is the division of meaning. Which gives Semantic roles to other phrases in the Sentence. Another side of verb role is demanding the necessary phrases, because they are used up to the verb demand. In other words, verb dominates both Syntactic and Semantic aspects of the sentence.

A Phonological Comparison of Khorasan and Northern Kurmanji

The aim of this study is to compare the Kurmanji of Khorasan with standard north Kurdish (standard Kurmanji). The dialect of Khorasani Kurdish is north Kurdish (Kurmanji). The Kurds of Khorasan live mainly in the two districts, Northern and Razavi Khorasan. The total number of the Khorasani Kurds can be estimated almost one million. This region is characterised by a large ethnic diversity; Kurds, Baluches, Faris, Lors, Turks, Turkmens, etc., though most of them have appeared here as a result of migration from other areas. The mixture of population in the region had some effect on Kurdish dialect that is spoken in that area. This study will focus on the phonological changes of kurmanji dialect of the Khorasani Kurdish. Keywords: Phonology, Kurdish Language, North Kurdish (Kurmanji), Khorasani Kurmanji

Review of the book "Teşeyên Nezmê"

The article is a review of the book Teşeyên Nezmê by Professor Dr. Abdul Rahman Adak, published by Nûbihar Publishing House. The book consists of 638 pages. The book explains how Kurdish poets write their poems. He talks extensively about every type of poetry and shows many interesting poems by ancient poets of all Kurdish dialects. It can be said that the subject of the book is not limited only to the forms of poetry composition, but rather it is a selection and description of ancient Kurdish poets, because the book contains interesting information and examples about each of the poets. The book also uses a scientific approach to talk about the relationship of Kurdish poetry to Persian, Arab, and Turkish poetry, and shows the specificity of Kurdish poetry, so it is possible to benefit from the scientific information contained in this book about Islamic literature generally.

Translation Difficulties Encounteted by Translation Students at University Level

This paper seeks to identify various difficulties that translation students face during the translation process. The data for this descriptive qualitative and quantitative study came from students’ verbalizing their translation loudly. The participants in the study were five fourth-year students from the Department of Translation, University of Duhok who voluntarily participated to translate two texts (literary and non-literary) from English into Kurdish. Any use of resources was permitted, and think-aloud protocols, as a research tool was used to collect the data. The experiment recordings, and verbal reports produced by the participants were used to analyze the data. According to the study's findings, translation students had several difficulties within the process, including translating words with no equivalents, comprehending the figurative language (simile), translating cultural-specific items, struggling with the style of the given text, putting ideas together, relating background knowledge to the text at hand, choosing the right equivalent, and confusing between the two Kurdish dialects (Sorani and Kurmanji). The findings recommend additional research to look at potential solutions to such difficulties. The study's findings led to conclusions that have ramifications for theory and practice. The summary of the major translation difficulties demonstrates the theoretical value of the study. It was also found out that the difficulty of translation is not always anticipated and is not always conceptually explicable.

Principles of Ritual Prayer: An 18th Century Catechism in Bahdini Kurdish

Abstract This article presents an edition and linguistic analysis of a verse catechism in the Bahdini dialect of Kurdish. The manuscript of the text is dated to late 18th century and is held among the Oriental manuscripts collections of the Berlin State Library. The text is a didactic verse on the principles and rules of the Islamic ritual prayer (ṣalāt), belonging thus to the catechism or in its Turkish-Arabic term ʿilm -i ḥāl genre. It is the oldest example of the catechism genre, different from creeds, in Kurdish literature that started in the late 16th century. The text is edited here within the context of religious treatises in Kurdish and analysed for its historical-linguistic and dialectological aspects that illustrate Early Modern Kurdish.

Tackling the Divide in the Kurdish Language

Abstract This article is an autoethnographic account that traces the widening divide between Kurdish dialects in the age of nation-states. It aspires to problematize and go beyond the widespread gap characterizing the Kurdish language along two dialects and alphabets. From its emergence as a non-state language in the 1920s onward, Kurdish actors sought to revive Kurmanji Kurdish in Damascus, Beirut and Yerevan; and Sorani Kurdish in Sulaimaniya and Baghdad. While the Kurmanji side of the story and its actors have been studied to a certain degree, how Kurdish developed in Sulaimaniya and Baghdad has received little scholarly attention. Through its author’s autoethnographic account of acquiring literacy in both dialects which recently came to fruition at the Zheen Center for Documentation and Research in Sulaimaniya, this article provides some reflections on the story of the Kurdish language in the age of nation-states.

Guided Play Supporting Immigrant Children’s Participation and Bilingual Development in Preschools

In recent decades, refugee immigration has had significant impact on educational contexts in Sweden, with preschools the primary arenas for young children’s language learning experiences. The present study examines second language and literacy training practices for immigrant children (aged 1–5) in preschools in Sweden. The empirical data consist of video recordings of teacher-guided play activities. These were designed to create rich linguistic and cultural environments facilitating active and democratic participation by the children. Guided play activities were developed in close collaboration between teachers and researchers during action-based interventions that were aimed at constructing child-oriented participatory language learning practices in ethnically and linguistically diverse ECEC settings. The children’s first languages were Tigrinya, Arabic dialects, Somalian, Kurdish dialects, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. The participatory learning potential of guided play was collaboratively analyzed and assessed, and new and revised activities were implemented, based on the goals of inclusivity and children’s active engagement in play and language learning. The analysis shows that teachers’ use of multimodal semiotic means, such as questions, texts and cultural artifacts (stories, material story-related objects, play spaces) were important strategies for the preparation of appealing play environments and activities that contributed to children’s curiosity and participation. These resources served as affordances for guided play, allowing the simultaneous scaffolding of children’s play competencies and their language learning.

A hybrid part-of-speech tagger with annotated Kurdish corpus: advancements in POS tagging

Abstract With the rapid growth of online content written in the Kurdish language, there is an increasing need to make it machine-readable and processable. Part of speech (POS) tagging is a critical aspect of natural language processing (NLP), playing a significant role in applications such as speech recognition, natural language parsing, information retrieval, and multiword term extraction. This study details the creation of the DASTAN corpus, the first POS-annotated corpus for the Sorani Kurdish dialect. The corpus, containing 74,258 words and thirty-eight tags, employs a hybrid approach utilizing the bigram hidden Markov model in combination with the Kurdish rule-based approach to POS tagging. This approach addresses two key problems that arise with rule-based approaches, namely misclassified words and ambiguity-related unanalyzed words. The proposed approach’s accuracy was assessed by training and testing it on the DASTAN corpus, yielding a 96% accuracy rate. Overall, this study’s findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach and its potential to enhance NLP applications for Sorani Kurdish.

Semantic roles arguments verb in the kurdish language accordind to the model of van valin (2005 ad)

The semantics roles are considered one of the important linguistic topics. This research aims at shedding light on the semantic roles that Van Valin (2005 AD) has included, since his model is distinguished from other models of semantic roles, whether in terms of the number of semantic roles or in terms of naming each semantic role. This study has applied this model to the local dialect of Bahdin Kurdish, as it has showed verb arguments according to Van Valin model, because this semantic role is assigned to the argument. The most important questions that have been raised by this study: How many semantic roles are there according to (Van) Valin‌s model (2005 AD) In what case is the word an argument and in what case is it complementary? At the end, the relevant findings have been discussed in terms of Van Valin‌s (2005 AD) models. Moreover, the semantic roles have been divided into three levels, each level contains as aspect of the semantic roles, and it has been able to display 40 thematic relationships. The current study has succeeded to distinguish between arguments and compliments.

Ezafe in Northern Kurdish

This chapter describes the forms and functions of the Ezafe in Northern Kurdish. The NP in this language is head-initial and Ezafe is used to link modifiers, including possessors, in the postnominal domain to their head nouns. The Northern Kurdish Ezafe reflects the phi-features such as number and gender, and the definiteness of the head noun, and it has different functions. It behaves like a typical adnominal linker that connects any type of postnominal modifier, such as attributive adjectives, adpositions and finite clauses, to the head noun. It also appears after null Ns and behaves like a prosodically independent element. Lastly, in certain Northern Kurdish dialects, it functions as a part of the verbal predicate and expresses stative, existential, and tense/aspectual readings.

‘Gan qey bedenî yeno çi mana’ (What the Soul Means for the Body): Collecting and Archiving Kurdish Folklore as a Strategy for Language Revitalization and Indigenous Knowledge Production

Folklore-collecting initiatives in Turkey and Iran have become increasingly popular over the past decade. In this article we present a historical overview of folklore-collecting practices and focus on more recent developments in this field. While Kurdish folklore has been perceived as a cornerstone of Kurdish national identity and as a source of information on Kurdish history, today’s collectors in Turkey and Iran understand its role in a wider context of language revitalization and indigenous knowledge production. Collecting oral traditions in the Kurdish dialects of Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zazaki is appreciated as a step towards protecting and developing the Kurdish language, which is endangered by language assimilation policies in both countries. Reviving folkloric vocabulary, stories, and traditional knowledge practices such as agricultural teachings, folklore collectors revive and promote indigenous knowledge production, and enrich education and research. Drawing on language revitalization theories and indigenous knowledge production, this article offers insights into unexplored aspects of collecting, archiving, and publishing Kurdish folklore in recent years.

The analysis of finite raising constructions in Ilami Kurdish

This paper is an attempt to investigate hyper-raising constructions in Ilami Kurdish (henceforth IK), a southern dialect of Kurdish, spoken in Iran. In particular, we aim to argue that these constructions, which involve the extraction of a DP out of a finite CP, represent an A-movement which ‘leaves behind a resumptive pro in the extraction position’ for assigning case-marking and further concord-agreement relations, the operation which was proposed by Ademola-Adeoye (2011) regarding hyper-raising, hyper-ECM and copy raising in language. Results show that IK permits subject-to-subject and also object-to-subject raising. The latter, with its effects on the matrix verb, has not been discussed so much in literature and is stipulated to be a language-specific feature found in IK. It seems safe to conclude that parametric analysis of IK raising structures might be more plausible instead of imposing a strict pattern of raising (definitely English-type pattern) on this dialect.

The Morphophonemic (/i/) in the Central Kurdish dialect of the language

The morphophonemic (/i/) in the Central Kurdish dialect of the Kurdish language, in the (Phonetic, Phonological, Morphological, and Syntactic) structures appear as the same form, but they are different in their structures. This research is conducted on (analytical- descriptive) method, and aome of the equivalent forms of (/i/) are analyzed based on the principles of generative school. For the purpose of presenting the examples, along with the phonemic alphabet, international phonetic alphabet (IPA) is also used. The examples are taken from daily expressions in central Kurdish dialect. In compared words, the vowel phoneme proves itself in the smallest phonological two-word example, and is differed from the semi-consonant (/i/). In the morphological and syntactic structures, it performes different duties as a bound morpheme, and due to the present stress, the long sound of (/i:/) or the short (/i/) are embodied.

Homonymy in the Light of Phonology

This paper is dedicated for the study of homonymy in the light of phonology. In this paper, a group of some words of (homonymy and pun) are attempted to be explained from phonological and trace model perspectives, not semantic. The content of the paper consists of an introduction, two parts, conclusions, and the abstract in English and Arabic Languages. The first part is allocated for theory and hypothesis. In the second part, it is demonstrated that the process of homophony is more related to phonology (stress, ton/pith, accent), such as that (stress, high, and low) of the syllabic sounds are not alike in the homophonic words. In other words, the homophonic group of words require different forms for themselves, hence, they are not homophones. The explanations are based on the theory of structuralism and generative grammar. The data and examples are taken from daily spoken language (Kurdish language- Central Kurdish Dialect) and some poetry lines. For the sake of explaining the examples more in detail, with the Kurdish (phoneme- alphabet), the IPA phonetic alphabet is also used.

Cohesive devices of Administrative Texts in Kurdish Language

This research paper is entitled ‘’ Cohesive devices of Administrative Texts in Kurdish Language’’. In this paper, the approach of descriptive analysis is followed and cohesion and its types in terms of the model of systematic functional grammar proposed by Halliday are presented. Afterwards, the types of grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions) and lexical cohesion (repetition, synonyms, antonyms, collocations…etc.) are discussed. For the data collection, administrative texts are considered as a type of the texts written in the Kurmanji dialect of central Kurdish which directly expresses the change of language ideology for the written administrative text and realizes the language textual function. In this way, the types of cohesive devices of administrative texts are analysed and it is demonstrated that these cohesive devices have had a role in cohesion and coherence of the administrative texts.