Kurdish Language Research Articles

The spirit of the book cafe: Kurdish-language activism and the contested values of youth and culture in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article deploys a semiotic anthropological analysis of value to understand the recent emergence and spread of the Kurdish book cafe, or pirtûk kafe, using it as a window into the changing state of Kurdish language-activism and Kurdish youth culture in Turkey. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with cafe owners, operators, and patrons, the article offers both an overview of the pirtûk kafe in contemporary Turkey and an analysis of its role in promoting Kurdish culture and the use of the Kurdish language among the country’s youth.

Grammatical Analysis of Kinship Terms in Sorani Kurdish Language

The research paper provides a comprehensive grammatical analysis of Kurdish kinship terms, which is a vital aspect of the Kurdish language. It examines the morphological and syntactic properties of kinship terms, categorization according to the part of speech and the distinctions of their grammatical gender and number .The study delves into the morphological composition of these terms, analyzing the various affixes and morphemes that contribute to their formation, including inflectional suffixes, honorific prefixes, and other derivational processes. Additionally, this research focuses on the vocative forms of kinship terms, investigating their unique grammatical features and. This study aims to enhance the understanding of the complexity and nuances inherent in the Kurdish kinship terminology.

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.

Analysis of the idioms of (head) in Kurdish language, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics

This study is entitled (Analysis of the idioms of (head) in Kurdish language, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics). Language is one of the most important human achievements and occupies a large space in human life. Therefore, since the ancient times, humans have paid attention to it and tried to understand its secrets. Idioms are an important part of any language, and studying them helps us to understand the relationship between idioms and metaphors. The school of cognitive linguistics looks at idioms differently from all other linguistic schools. Other linguistic schools have studied the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of idioms and viewed them as fixed and inseparable structures and expressions. However, the cognitive linguists have a completely different view; they see idioms as conceptual metaphors and interpret every conceptual metaphor in terms of the conceptual matching and interaction between the source and target fields. Our study is an interpretation of the idioms of (head) from the school of cognitive linguistics’ perspective, in light of the theory of conceptual metaphor, the interpretation of idioms has been conducted. In general, the study consists of the introduction, two chapters, the results and the list of references. The first chapter discusses the perception of both schools of ancient and cognitive linguistics for idioms as well as the theory of conceptual metaphor, types of conceptual metaphors and metaphorical interaction between the source and target fields. In the second chapter, the idioms of (head) have been analyzed according to the theory of conceptual metaphor, followed by the results and a list of references.

LI DOR ZAYEND Û NETEWE(TÎ)YÊ JINA KURD DI BERHEMÊN ELIYÊ EVDILREHMANÎ DA

Nationalism is a masculine field and is based on “the unity of brothers”. However, there is an important participation of women in national projects. Women play an important role in the construction, strengthening and continuity of nationalism, both through active participation and through cultural and ideological involvement. Therefore, women attract the attention of national movements and discourses and become an indispensable subject of nationalism. This situation is also seen in the works of Eliyê Evdilrehman. In this context, in order to verify this claim, three works of Eliyê Evdilrehman, named Xatê Xanim, Şer Li Çîya, Gundê Mêrxasan, in which he tries to create a national identity with nationalist discourse and equip his readers with a Kurdish consciousness, have been examined. As a result, it was seen that the author presented the Kurdish woman as a national representation with her different roles and characteristics. The author characterises Kurdish women as rulers, leaders, warriors, resisters, advisors to men, biological carriers, carriers of culture and honour and idealises them as strong, free, intelligent and visionary. The author has glorified the Kurdish woman greatly, but he has done so by using sexist language and attributing masculine behavior and characteristics to women. Therefore, ironically and paradoxically, the glorification of Kurdish women in the works studied served to reproduce the patriarchy embedded in the Kurdish language and society.

Курдский народ в борьбе за независимость (вторая половина ХХ – начало ХХI в.) и геноцид в Иракском Курдистане

The article delves into the struggle of the people of Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan for self-determination and the repression of the ruling regime in Iraq, which brought the Kurdish population to the brink of extermination. The issue of Southern Kurdistan in Iraq has been on the agenda for many decades. The Iraqi Kurds achieved self-government at the cost of incredible efforts. It is emphasized that the recognition of the right to territorial autonomy by the Iraqi government in 1974 was a success of the Kurdish national movement. However, the infringement of the rights of the Kurds continued. The apogee of the repressions were the events of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988 and the use of chemical weapons against the population of the autonomy. In 2005, Iraq promulgated a new draft Constitution, which reflected the opinion of all ethno-confessional groups of the country – Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds: the country was declared a Federal Republic, and the Kurdish language was declared the state language on the territory of Kurdistan. Conclusion dwells upon the fact that the centuries-long struggle of the Kurds of Iraq ended with the proclamation of autonomy and the granting of democratic rights and freedoms to the population of the Kurdish Autonomous Region. And the facts reflected in the documents of international organizations on the deliberate destruction of the Kurdish minority in Iraq, especially during the years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, are obvious. An important condition for the success of the Kurdish national movement at any stage of its development is the unity of its ranks. The methodological basis of the article is the principles of historicism and objectivity. Documentary materials, personal sources, and media news data serve as the empirical basis of the study and are introduced into scientific discourse.

Digital Evolution: Exploring the Impact of Social Media on Local Dialects and Lexicon; An Examination of Central Kurdish Language

This study suggests a digital linguistic approach to multi-mediated communication (MMC), drawing on a case study of language variation on social media. In the early 21st century, social media (SM) has significantly impacted various aspects of human life, including language, as articulated within the theoretical framework of digital linguistics and language variation. This study explores the influence of SM on Kurdish local dialects in Iraqi Kurdistan, with a focus on vocabulary evolution and the ongoing challenge of dialect standardization. Given the high unemployment rates in Iraq, which have led to increased SM engagement, this research examines how these platforms affect dialect usage across diverse demographic groups. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the study integrates qualitative content analysis and quantitative surveys to assess SM's role in shaping linguistic practices. Findings reveal thatolder generations are more likely to maintain traditional dialects, while younger users increasingly adopt standardized Kurdish forms. The study highlights SM's dual impact: promoting linguistic convergence while posing risks to dialectal diversity. It emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that supports regional dialects alongside the benefits of standardization, advocating for strategic initiatives to preserve linguistic heritage while adapting to digital influences.

Kurdish Vernacular Learning as Indigenous Knowledge: Decolonizing Ottoman Cultural and Intellectual History

This contribution explores in what ways the Kurdish experience may be called “colonial” and, by extension, what decolonizing Kurdish studies would or could amount to. Specifically, it explores whether and to what extent Kurdish vernacular learning may be qualified as “Indigenous learning” as it appears in decolonial critiques. The article suggests a genealogical approach to the epistemic dimensions of coloniality to explicate the radical historicity of knowledge and to make visible relations of domination and resistance in the field of knowledge and learning. Early modern Kurdish vernacular learning, it will be argued, was produced under the domination of Persian and Arabic, and to some extent it amounted to heresy, that is, an act of symbolic resistance. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the vernacularization of Kurdish language and learning in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire and in Mollah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî’s encounter with nineteenth-century Russian imperialism and Orientalism.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING BLENDED LEARNING STRATEGY IN THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT BY SEVENTH-GRADE BASIC STUDENTS IN THE SUBJECT OF KURDISH LANGUAGE

The current study aims to identify the effectiveness of using the blended learning strategy in the academic achievement of seventh-grade students in the Kurdish language subject. The research sample consisted of (114) male and female students from the seventh grade in basic education schools for boys and girls in the city of Zakho for the academic year (2022-2023). It was chosen intentionally by stratified random method from the research community according to the gender variable, then the researcher divided the sample into four equal groups in several variables based on the factorial experimental design (2X2) in the variables of teaching method and gender. The two experimental groups studied the Kurdish language subject according to the blended learning strategy, while the two control groups studied the same subject traditionally. The researcher verified the validity of the content of the test and extracted its psychometric characteristics as well as its stability. After collecting data from the research sample and processing it statistically using the two-way factor analysis of variance test according to the variables of gender, teaching method, and the interaction between them, the results indicated: 1- There is a statistically significant difference at the level (0.05) between the averages of the Kurdish language achievement among the members of the research groups according to the gender variable in favor of females and the method in favor of the blended learning strategy. 2- There is no statistically significant difference at the level (0.05) between the averages of the members of the research groups in the achievement of the Kurdish language according to the interaction of the variables of gender and method. In light of the results, the researcher came out with several conclusions, including the possibility of applying the blended learning strategy in teaching the Kurdish language to students in basic education. The researcher also put forward some recommendations and proposals in the form of titles for future research.

Validity And Reliability Of The Central Kurdish Version Of The Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire (THQ-CK)

Background — The goal of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Central Kurdish version of the Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire (THQ-CK). Initially, the THQ was translated into the central Kurdish language, resulting in the THQ-CK. Subsequently, a supplementary assessment was conducted to ascertain the reliability and validity of the THQ-CK. Methods — The original version of the THQ was translated into the Kurdish language and then offered to 275 tinnitus patients. The procedures were performed using published guidelines for cross-cultural adaptation of health-related quality of life measures. The Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire (THQ), the Tinnitus Primary Function Questionnaire (TPFQ), and the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for tinnitus loudness and annoyance were offered to participants suffering from tinnitus. In addition, a pure-tone audiogram was obtained. Results — Our study encompassed a total of 275 patients (132 female, 143 male). Their mean age was 47.43±14.32 years. Of them, 43.6% previously worked in a noisy environment. The internal consistency of the THQ total score and its factors (Cronbach’s alpha of total scores: 0.833; factors: 0.949, 0.959, 0.960) suggested excellent reliability. The test-retest correlation coefficient demonstrated excellent reliability (0.9) for the total scores, and factors 1 and 2, but moderate reliability (0.66) for factor 3. The THQ-CK demonstrated good construct validity, as indicated by the strong correlation (r=0.757) between the THQ-CK and TPFQ scores. Conclusion — The evaluation of the validity and reliability of the THQ-CK suggests that it is a reliable instrument for assessing the impact of tinnitus on individuals in the central Kurdish-speaking population. The study contributes valuable information to the field of tinnitus research and opens up avenues for future cross-cultural studies.

A Hybrid Approach to Ontology Construction for the Badini Kurdish Language

Semantic ontologies have been widely utilized as crucial tools within natural language processing, underpinning applications such as knowledge extraction, question answering, machine translation, text comprehension, information retrieval, and text summarization. While the Kurdish language, a low-resource language, has been the subject of some ontological research in other dialects, a semantic web ontology for the Badini dialect remains conspicuously absent. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a methodology for constructing and utilizing a semantic web ontology for the Badini dialect of the Kurdish language. A Badini annotated corpus (UOZBDN) was created and manually annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags. Subsequently, an HMM-based POS tagger model was developed using the UOZBDN corpus and applied to annotate additional text for ontology extraction. Ontology extraction was performed by employing predefined rules to identify nouns and verbs from the model-annotated corpus and subsequently forming semantic predicates. Robust methodologies were adopted for ontology development, resulting in a high degree of precision. The POS tagging model attained an accuracy of 95.04% when applied to the UOZBDN corpus. Furthermore, a manual evaluation conducted by Badini Kurdish language experts yielded a 97.42% accuracy rate for the extracted ontology.

Compound words of Central Kurdish from the perspective of configuration theory

This study is entitled “Compound Words of Central Kurdish from the Perspective of Configuration Theory”. to analyzes compound words from the perspective of Configuration theory. The scope is within the framework of Cognitive Morphology based on Zaki Hamawand (2011). The importance of this research is the originality as the first work in Kurdish language on the mentioned field above. The concept and meaning of compound words are changed, according to people's view and experiences. They fall into different domains, which is the problem. The aim of the study is to find a solution from the perspective of configuration theory for it, and identify the domain and facet, that include Central Kurdish compound nouns and compound adjectives. The focus is only on compound nouns and adjectives among compound words for analysis process. In addition to the researcher’s interest and being native in the targeted language, the used materials are taken from library data that are used as sources in the study. The paper consists of an introduction, two sections, conclusions, and the list of references. As a result, the domains and facets that contain Middle Kurdish compound nouns and compound adjectives are identified, which are explained by distinguishing two kinds: first, Compound words in Inter-class words. Second, Compound words in Intra-class words.

Jacobson’s Distinctive Features and the Analysis of assimilation in Kurdish Bahdini local dialect

Distinctive Features are generally used to describe the smallest units of sound in both phonetic and phonological analyses which aims to differentiate between the meaning of one word and another in a certain language. The topic of distinctive features has always caught the interest of phonologists and many schoolars used these features as the smallest units of sounds in order to describe sound features in all human languages. This research is an attempt to represent the distinctive features of Kurdish language, as well as to explain assimilation through Jacobson,s Distinctive Features in order to reach some phonological rules in Kurdish language. Samples are taken and analysed from revels written by speakers from the center of Duhok in order to represent the distinctive features of the sounds which affect the adjacent sounds, as well as creating the rules of the sounds which affect each other. Jacobson’s features are mainly based on a acoustic description of sounds. The most important hypotheses of this research show that this theory meets the following requisitions: Distinctive Features (DFs) can describe a natural class of sounds. They can also describe the distinctions of sounds in all languages of the world and these features can be defined phonological. In conolusion it is clear that in Bahdini local dialect, The changes often affect the sound which carries the feature (±voiced) of stop and fricative sounds in general, and upon the feature (+voiced) of fricative in novel particularly.

Completion of Nouns in the Kurdish Language According to the Opinion of Wolfgang Teubert

Completion of Nouns in the Kurdish Language According to the Opinion of Wolfgang Teubert

Lexicalization of transposed phrases in Kurdish language

This research is entitled of (Lexicalization of transposed phrases in Kurdish language). It’s an effort to present and analyzing for those phrases after the replacement of subject and predicate, during the process of transformational from deep structure to surface structure, became the lexicon unit. As it is known phrase is a syntax unit, but as a result of the development and change and the needs of language to naming and producing of new concept and meaning, again language resorts to other used units of language, that is why some of the language units moves from a level of language to another to reuse. One of those ways is reproduction of lexicon unit through syntax, one of the products of this way is the inverted phrase, again after the process of its inverting creator units. As an equivalent lexicon to a compound word.

Agent in Kurdish language (Bahdini subdialect)

The agent in the Kurdish language, especially in modern grammar, is known as a semantic role, limiting its function to the sentence level. To contradict this view, an attempt has been made in this study to explain the agent at both morphological and syntactic levels. At the morphological level, some derivational bound morphemes play a major role in forming some nouns that carry within themselves the concept of the agent known as agent nouns. Also at the sentence level, in addition to the semantic features of the noun phrase that identify and distinguish the agent role from other roles, it is expected that the verb phrase can contribute greatly in the identification and recognition of the agent. For this purpose, Larson's theory (1988) has been employed to deconstruct the VP-shell into the main verb phrase VP and the light verb phrase (carrier of the concept of agent in the VP). The sentences are analyzed according to Chomsky's minimalist program principles. Research data is collected from the everyday speech of Bahdini dialect speakers. Results show that Larson's theory of deconstructing the VP could be considered the best and only way to analyze the agent in the Bahdini sentence; and the morpheme (ان), in addition to its agentive and causative functions, can also function as a light verb.

Central Kurdish Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Novel End-to-End Transformer Training

Recent advancements in text-to-speech (TTS) models have aimed to streamline the two-stage process into a single-stage training approach. However, many single-stage models still lag behind in audio quality, particularly when handling Kurdish text and speech. There is a critical need to enhance text-to-speech conversion for the Kurdish language, particularly for the Sorani dialect, which has been relatively neglected and is underrepresented in recent text-to-speech advancements. This study introduces an end-to-end TTS model for efficiently generating high-quality Kurdish audio. The proposed method leverages a variational autoencoder (VAE) that is pre-trained for audio waveform reconstruction and is augmented by adversarial training. This involves aligning the prior distribution established by the pre-trained encoder with the posterior distribution of the text encoder within latent variables. Additionally, a stochastic duration predictor is incorporated to imbue synthesized Kurdish speech with diverse rhythms. By aligning latent distributions and integrating the stochastic duration predictor, the proposed method facilitates the real-time generation of natural Kurdish speech audio, offering flexibility in pitches and rhythms. Empirical evaluation via the mean opinion score (MOS) on a custom dataset confirms the superior performance of our approach (MOS of 3.94) compared with that of a one-stage system and other two-staged systems as assessed through a subjective human evaluation.

The process of vowel harmony in Kurdish language in the framework of Autosegmental phonology

This study discusses the vowels harmony in Kurdish language. Vowel harmony like assimilation process is a very common process in most languages of the world. This process is studied by most phonological theories, such as generative phonology, autosegmental phonology as well as optimality theory. We examine this process from the perspective of autosegmental phonology in this paper. Therefore, we can say that the aim of this study is to investigate the process of vowel harmony in Kurdish language from the perspective of autosegmental phonology. The methodology of this study is to analyze the content of the articles and collect the data with appropriate samples. Autosegmental theory is one of the theories in the field of phonology and was first emerged by Goldsmith as an independent field of generative phonology. In 1976, along with the study of rhyme languages, he introduced autosegmental phonology and then it was published in tonal languages. This theory is actually a field or part of production phonology.

Adjective Valency in Kurdish Language

Valency is the ability of lexical categories to include complements in sentences. Although this ability is expressed in sentences, lexical categories also have this ability in the dictionary. In other words, one records the loading of lexical categories in one's mind. The lexical categories that load are verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adverbs. These categories differ in terms of the type and number of supplements. In this study, work is done on the loading of pronouns in Kurdish. Pronouns have their own complements, which are different in terms of type and number. The scope of the research is conducted within the framework of Kurdish language (middle dialect). Our research method is descriptive. The content of the study is divided into two main parts besides the introduction and conclusion.

Constructing Complex Words in the Dictionary of Ghazi

Abstract Constructing Complex Words in the Dictionary of Ghazi In linguistics; there are various ways to increase vocabularies in dictionary. One of the ways to increase words is called the complex method. Complex words have not been studied until now in Kurdish language. The study is entitled ``Constructing Complex Words in the Dictionary of Ghazi``. It is a bilingual (Kurdish- Arabic) and (Arabic- Kurdish) dictionary. Throughout this research, the researcher tries to show the constructing complex words that have been used in the Kurdish and Arabic language via certain rules. The research utilizes the qualitative method; this research is of immense significance because it has not been conducted enough in Kurdish language especially in the Bahdini Kurdish dictionary. The purpose of this study is revealing how the rules of the complex words were composed or constructed in the dictionary. In addition to that, the study concentrates on divulging the rate of the rules used in constructing the complex words. In other words, the researcher will confirm how each rule for the constructed complex words have been put into use, and he will also show the percentage of these words. The newness of the title of the research is the chief research problem. Hence the researcher will attempt to display the complex words and their rules as well as their percentage in his research, therefore; the results will be unfolded accordingly. Key words: Words, derivation, percentage, Ghazi dictionary, constructing, complex.