Kurdish Dialects Research Articles

Lakī and Kurdish

AbstractThis paper aims at verifying the traditional set of phonetic changes, defined by D. N. Mackenzie as the main distinctive feature of the Kurdish dialects, with regard to Lakī having yet no clear affiliation in the Iranian dialectology. It is usually considered to be a dialect of Kurdish, sometimes a transitional dialect between Kurdish and Luri, and even a separate idiom.

Unaccusative transitives and the Person-Case Constraint effects in Kurdish

The purpose of this paper is to unravel the intricacies brought about by the eccentric pattern of agreement in Kurdish unaccusative transitive constructions. 1 1 The Kurdish dialect under discussion is called ‘ Sorani’ which is spoken in the Kurdish areas across the border of Iran and Iraq limited to Kurdistan and Azarbaijan-e Gharbi provinces in Iran and Suleymania and Erbil provinces in Iraq. We will propose that there is a strict correlation between Agree in syntax ( Chomsky, 2000, 2001) and Agreement in morphology ( Bobaljik, 2008) to the effect that the φ-features shared by the controller and the target of Agreement in PF must match the corresponding φ-features shared via Agree in narrow syntax. We will specifically argue that the φ-feature mismatch at the syntax–morphology interface is responsible for the emergence of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC) effects. Viewing the PCC from this perspective provides adequate grounds to account for the default agreement and focus movement as ways of circumventing the PCC in Kurdish. At an explanatory level this work presents corroborative evidence to conceive of the PCC as an epiphenomenon ensuing from the interplay of the more general principles at the syntax–morphology interface.

Arkawāzī and His Baweyaļ: A Feylî Elegiac Verse from Piştiku

The study of southern Kurdish literature is largely dominated by a bipolar perspective. Literature in southern Kurdistan is mostly, if not exclusively viewed in the context of relations between Iran on the one hand and, on the other, Iraq, the local states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, Iran acquired a dominant role in southern Kurdistan, yet it is also considered to have been the only dynamic factor in southern Kurdish dialect, while the Iraqi regions are supposed to have fulfilled an essentially passive one. This article presents the most well-known poem of Arkawāzī, a southern Kurdish poet from Piştiku, an Iranian region of southern Kurdistan. It transcribes, translates, and glosses a Feylî elegiac text in which the poet describes the death of his son. Notwithstanding my dialectological purpose, the article may also provide some raw material for the historians.

A Hūra-Song in Kalhorī

AbstractKalhorī is the less investigated dialect of Southern Kurdish. The paper introduces a Kalhorī folk-song of the hūra genre (with parallel English translation and commentaries), selected from the vast corpus of the Southern Kurdish dialect and folkloric materials, which have been collected from the Kalhor-inhabited regions of Western Iran.

Zîn-ə Hördemîr: A Lekî Satirical Verse from Lekistan

With the exception of a minor mention, which Sharaf Khān (b.1543) made in theSharafnāma, the first information about the most southern group of Kurdish tribes in Iranian Kurdistan, the Lek, first became available to modern readers inBustān al-Sīyāḥa, a geographical and historical Persian text by Shīrwānī (1773–1832). These hitherto unknown Lek communities, were probably settled in north-western and northern Luristan, known as Lekistan, by order of Shāh ‘Abbās, who wished in this way to create some support for Ḥusayn Khān, thewālīof Luristan. Many of the centres of Lekî intellectual life in the late Afshārīd and early Zand period, which is also of much importance in that the Zand dynasty arose from it, are located in this geographical area. One has only to call to mind the names of such places as Alishtar (Silsila), Kūhdasht, Khāwa, Nūr Ābād, Uthmānwand and Jalālwand in the most southern districts of Kirmānshāh, and also the Lek tribes of eastern Īlām. The very mention of these cities and villages already sets in motion in one's imagination the parade of Twelver Shiites, Ahl-i Haqq heretics, and non-religious oral literary councils which constitutes the history of Lekî new era. But unfortunately little of this is known in the West and Lekî literature remains one of the neglected subjects of literary and linguistic Kurdish studies. This important oral literature and also some written manuscripts are unpublished and untranslated into western languages. The subject of this article is the translation ofZîn-ə Hördemîr, as an example of a genre of Lekî written literature which also provides linguistic data for the Lekî dialect of southern Kurdish.

A lexical account of Sorani Kurdish prepositions

In Sorani Kurdish dialects, the complement of a preposition can generally be realized either as a syntactic item (NP, independent pronoun or PP) or a bound personal morpheme (clitic/affix). However, the affixal realization of the complement gives rise to a range of specific phenomena. First, some prepositions display two different phonological forms depending on the realization of their complement: the variant combining with a syntactic item is referred to as ˋsimple', while the variant combining with an affixal complement is called ˋabsolute'. Furthermore, unlike syntactic complements, which are always realized locally, the affixal complement of an absolute preposition can have a non-local realization, attaching to a host with which it has no morphosyntactic relations. In order to deal with these facts, this paper proposes a classification of Sorani prepositions along two lines: the affixal versus non-affixal realization of the complement on the one hand and its local versus non-local realization on the other hand. All cases of non-local realization receive a lexical account, either in terms of argument composition or in terms of linearization constraints on domain objects.

Kurdish Ezafe construction: Implications for DP structure

In this paper, we will try to shed new light on the ‘ Ezafe’ construction in Kurdish. 1 1 The Kurdish dialect under discussion is called ‘ Sorani’ which is spoken in the Kurdish areas across the border of Iran and Iraq limited to Kurdistan and Azarbaijan-e Gharbi provinces in Iran and Suleymania and Arbil provinces in Iraq. The following abbreviations are used in this paper: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, ACC = accusative, CMPR = comparative, CONJ = conjunction, DEF = definite(ness), EZ = Ezafe, GEN = genitive, INDEF = indefinite(ness), INFX = interfix, MS = masculine, NOM = nominative, PASS = passive, PL = plural, PrC = predicate construction, PsC = possessive construction, RC = relative clause, RP = relative pronoun, SG = singular. Drawing on historical facts and tracing the Ezafe back to its origins on the one hand, and the unified relation of adjectives and possessors to the head nouns, namely modification, on the other hand, we will argue for the existence of the predicate phrase which Ezafe realizes its head above the NP. The occurrence of the Ezafe will be attributed to the presence of such a functional head which serves to turn a property expression, assigned to the modifier constituent XP, into a propositional function which in turn needs to be saturated by an argument, that is the head noun. Extending the syntactic realization of predication from clausal domain to nominal domain is part of a broader project, which aims at further assimilation of the structure of DPs to clauses.

Are Kurds a Pariah Minority?

KURDS invariably greet visitors to “Kurdistan” with a cup of sweet tea and the complaint that they are “the largest people without a nation.” They are right. Approximately 24 million Kurds are spread across Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iran, and the countries of the Caucasus. While the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East (after Arabs, Persians, and Turks), they remain destined to be a minority spread among nations.1 But are they a pariah minority? And what historic responsibility do the Kurds themselves bear for their status? Kurds and Kurdistan The term “Kurdistan” first appeared in the fourteenth century, but like many regions before the rise of nationalism, its boundaries shifted through time (Nikitine, 1956: 23). Today, the area claimed as Kurdistan spans 500,000 square kilometers—roughly the size of Spain—and stretches from the center of Turkey to the southern Caucasus and then southward along the Iran-Iraq border (Bois, 1965: 1-2). Kurdistan literally means “land of the Kurds,” but the area is not homogenous and contains Arabs, Turks, Persians, Assyrians, and Armenians, among others. Many Kurds live outside Kurdistan as well. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the shahs of Iran’s Safavid dynasty transferred Kurds to Khorasan in what is now northeastern Iran, conscripting them to guard the SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring 2003) Are Kurds a Pariah Minority?* MICHAEL RUBIN *I am grateful for the help provided by Seth Wikas, a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well as that of many Iraqi Kurds who must remain anonymous until their future is more secure. frontier against marauding Uzbeks (Avery, 1991: 4-5). More recently, urban migration has shifted Kurdish demographics. The city with the world’s largest Kurdish population today is Istanbul, followed closely by Ankara, even though neither city falls within traditional Kurdistan (Koknar, 1999). There is even disagreement over who can be considered a Kurd. When I lived in Iraqi Kurdistan during the academic year 2000-2001, some officials insisted that the Lur and Bakhtiari tribesmen of Iran were actually Kurds, although most Lur and Bakhtiari consider themselves distinct peoples (Tapper, 1997: 11; Garthwaite, 1983: 18; Mortensen, 1993: 44). Likewise, linguistic or religious minorities, such as the Zaza of Turkey and the Chaldeans of Iraq, often seek to be recognized as separate ethnicities. Despite the frequent use of the term “Kurdistan,” only in Iran and Iraq does the name have official definition. In Iran, Kurdistan is a province, albeit one that encompasses just one-eighth of the area in Iran inhabited by Kurds.2 In Iraq, the 1974 autonomy law defined Kurdistan as areas found by the 1957 census to have a Kurdish majority, meaning the governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah. However, Kurds have long disputed the census , and make additional claims on both the city and governorate of Kirkuk (McDowall, 2000: 336). Among the Kurds, there is religious, linguistic, and tribal diversity . Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with perhaps 15 percent Shiite . Tens of thousands of Kurds also adhere to Islamic heterodox and pre-Islamic religions. For example, perhaps 1 million Alevi Kurds live in Turkey. Alevi theology combines a pivotal role for the Caliph ‘Ali (one of Muhammad’s companions and the fourth caliph) with vestiges of pre-Islamic beliefs (Boseley, 1989).3 Yezidi Kurds are concentrated in Iraq’s Ninawa and Dohuk governorates ; they claim approximately 140,000 adherents in Iraq (Khayli, 2001; Pope, 1993).4 (Yezidism is a pre-Islamic belief combining a cult of angels, with vestiges of pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism.)5 Communities of Kaka’is (Ahl-i Haqq) 296 SOCIAL RESEARCH blend pre-Islamic beliefs with Shia Islam and live in mountain villages along the Iran-Iraq border (During, 1998). Language is perhaps the factor that most divides Kurds today. Kurdish is an Indo-Iranian language similar to the Persian spoken in neighboring Iran (and very dissimilar to Arabic and Turkish , both of which belong to separate language families). Kurdish is, however, divided into numerous dialects, not all of which are mutually intelligible. Generally speaking, the two most important Kurdish dialects are Kurmanji (sometimes called Bahdahnani, after a nineteenth-century emirate) and...

Healing Practices among the Yezidi Sheikhs of Armenia

The Yezidis, speakers of a Kurdish dialect living mainly in northern Iraq, are distinguished from the (Muslim) Kurds and other neighboring communities by their religion, a syncretism of Islamic and Christian elements with local indigenous cults. They are at pains both to distance themselves from the Kurds and to keep their rituals secret from outsiders, having gone so far as not to adopt Arabic or any other writing system and to stigmatize literacy. This report of field research among the exilic Yezidi communities of Armenia and southern Russia sketches the relationship of their traditional healing practices with their social structure and describes both a sanctioned treatment by a sheikh of one of the clerical castes and the practice of a non-traditional, but tolerated, woman healer and fortune-teller.

The ergative construction in Kurdish

It is well known that during the course of their histories a number of Indo-European languages, all of them members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the family, developed an ergative construction. Thus, in certain tenses of the verb, their grammars came to treat in forlly identical manner the subject of an intransitive verb and the logical object of a transitive verb, the agent (or logical subject) of this latter being given a different morphological marker. Now although ergativity has been studied in a wide variety of languages as a synchronic phenomenon, the opportunities for examining it from a diachronic point of view are in the great majority of cases severely limited by lack of historical documentation. The Indo-Iranian languages, however, form a notable exception. These, thanks to the availability of texts from closely related languages covering a time-span of some three millennia, provide us with a chance to observe both the development of the construction and its subsequent decline. The present paper will do no more than attempt to trace a part of this process, namely the way in which the ergative construction has disappeared from a certain area of western Iranian. It bases its arguments upon the assumption that the geographical continuum of the Kurdish dialects, whose grammars exhibit the whole range of possibilities from fully ergative systems in the north to fully accusative systems in the south, reflects the successive stages of a diachronic process. This being granted, it should be possible by ordering the synchronic patterns of representative dialects from the northern, the central and the southern regions, to arrive at a picture of the historical sequence of events which has led to the loss of ergativity in the southern dialects and to isolate the mechanisms involved in their resultant restructuring. The wider problems of precisely how the construction arose historically and of why within the Indo-European family it appears to be confined to Indo-Iranian will not be dealt with here.

XX. Notes on a Kurdish Dialect, the Shadi Branch of Kermanji

This one of the most northerly of the Kurdish dialects, spoken by a large tribe of Kurds inhabiting the mountains around Erzerum and to the east towards Bayazid, may be reckoned as one of the most important of the Turko-Kurd tongues on account of the regularity of conjugations of its verbs and richness of grammatical form as compared with other Kurdish tongues. With very few differences it may be classed as a companion dialect to that termed by Lerch and others who have studied northern Kurdish dialects, Kermānjī. A very harsh pronunciation is adopted by the Shādī Kurds, which renders their dialect incomprehensible to the southern Kurd. As in the Kermānjī, the influence of the Chaldean (Neo-Syriac) dialects is here and there apparent, and in a few instances Arabic is employed. Turkish, which might be expected to have furnished a proportion of the common words used, has been very sparsely employed. Considered as a whole, and allowing for differences created by corruption of pronunciation, the dialect appears as a well-preserved old Persian tongue. The Shādi Kurds, in common with some other tribes of the south, claim that their dialect is ancient Persian, and have reserved for it the name of Fārisī.

II A Southern Kurdish Folksong in Kermanshahi Dialect

The Kurdish dialect of Persian has so far received very little attention from Oriental students, though it fully merits study, for while actually nothing more than a Persian dialect it has not submitted to the erosion which time brings about in every language, and which is so marked a feature in the development of modern Persian. Nor has it been subject to that admixture of Arabic words which has become so great a part of Persian since the invasion of the early Muhammadan Arabs. As a consequence it has preserved intact many words now obsolete in the mother language.