Kurdish Speakers Research Articles

The Notion of Image Schemas in Kurdish Proverbs

This study examines the notion of image schemas in selected Kurdish proverbs. As used in Cognitive Semantics, image schemas refer to conceptual structures that represent recurring patterns in our experience of the physical and psychological world. They are abstract concepts consisting of patterns emerging from repeated instances of embodied experience. Examples of image schemas include CONTAINER, PATH, FORCE, SCALE and CYCLE schemas. Applied to Kurdish proverbs, it is argued that image schemas serve as the basis for organizing knowledge and reasoning about the world. They are derived from concrete physical experiences that are projected onto abstract concepts. The aim of the study then is to show how image schemas provide the basis for richly detailed lexical concepts. One interesting finding is that image schemas arise directly from sensory and perceptual experience. They are functions of Kurdish speakers’ everyday interaction with and observation of the world around them.

Attitudes of Kurdish university students towards the English language, English language education policies, and English language learning purposes

Similar to other parts of the world, Kurdish speakers of English have been subject to English fever. They have a strong desire to learn and speak English. An army of teachers is currently teaching Kurdish speakers to learn English. However, few of them acquire the required level of English when they move from high school level to university one. This might partly be associated with their attitudes towards not only the English language but the English language policies and practices that are currently adopted. Attitudes towards the English language have been extensively investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively in diversified educational and cultural contexts. Furthermore, a few studies have been conducted to investigate the attitudes of Kurdish students towards the English language, but their attitudes to English language education policies and English language learning purposes have yet remained unknown. Therefore, this study is anchored on investigating Kurdish undergraduate students’ attitudes towards the English language, English language education policies that are currently applied in Iraqi Kurdistan, and students’ purposes for learning English. It further concentrates on the effect of such variables as gender and year of study on attitudes. For this purpose, the study utilized a questionnaire consisting of 42 items on a 6-point Likert scale surveyed online on a sample of 154 students belonging to different ages, genders, years of study, and majors. The analysis of the data showed that Kurdish university students held neutral to mildly positive attitudes to the English language and English learning purposes. Nevertheless, they held slightly positive attitudes towards English language education policies. The study concludes that, although fundamental transformations have been achieved in the past two decades, the neutral attitudes show that efforts are yet to be made to satisfy students’ needs and desires, particularly with regard to the policies and practices that are currently adopted. This study, different from previous ones, reveals students’ attitudes towards English education policies whose findings are significant for English language education policymakers.

A Study Investigating Factors Related to Self-Immolation and Its Association with Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in Women of Reproductive Ages

Background: Self-immolation is one of the most common methods of suicide among Iranian women. This study was designed and conducted to investigate factors related to self-immolation and its association with depression, anxiety, and stress in women of reproductive age.
 Methods: The present descriptive-analytical study was performed on self-immolated women admitted to the burn ward of Imam Khomeini Hospital in Urmia during the years 2021-2020 the nineteen women of reproductive ages were included in the study through convenience and census. Data collection tools included a demographic questionnaire and DASS-21.
 Results: The average age of the participants in this project was 29.57 ± 7.79 years. About half of the women lived in rural areas and lived in the house of their father-in-law and lived with him. And the wife's family stated. Most of them were married, housewives and Kurdish speakers had low incomes and economic status and undergraduate education, and most of them had set themselves on fire with oil. 89.5% of the participants had severe depression, 94.5% had severe anxiety, and 52.6% had severe stress.
 Conclusion: This study showed that the rate of depression, anxiety, and stress is high in women who have attempted suicide by self-immolation. It is suggested that special measures be taken to reform the culture of the northwestern region of the country to perhaps reduce the burden of the problems of women in this region.

Patterns of Intonation in Central Kurdish A Study in Cognitive Phonology

The present study attempts to analyze intonation in Central Kurdish, the Sorani variety spoken in Slemani in Iraqi Kurdistan. Intonation refers to pitch fluctuations used by a speaker to express meanings. To carry out the analysis, the study embraces the theory of Cognitive Phonology. The study attempts to claim that there is a relationship between the pitch of a linguistic expression and its meaning. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that the meaning of an utterance is shaped by the particular intonation used by the speaker. The study has two aims. The first is to show that intonation, as a suprasegmental feature, is meaningful in Central Kurdish. The second is to show that using one pattern of intonation instead of another is the result of the construal dimension of perspective. As native Kurdish speakers, the researchers are being used as sources of data. One important finding is that Kurdish intonation is meaningful because using one pattern of intonation instead of another is consequential. A change in tone adds a specific tint of meaning to the utterance in spoken language.

The Pronunciation Problems among Kurdish Learners of English

The goal of this study was to examine the pronunciation issues of different speakers of English and especially Kurdish speakers, and various perspectives on native vs foreign pronunciations. The research showed that Kurdish speakers had difficulties pronouncing several English vowels and some English consonants. The research results demonstrate that Kurdish English speakers understand the value of pronunciation compared to native and non-native English speakers. Kurdish speakers may hesitate to speak in a manner that seems natural to a native speaker, and their last consonants in words are almost always unaspirated and unvoiced. Given that Kurdish learners of English have difficulty pronouncing some English words, some suggested solutions include providing pronunciation instruction classes to language instructors, having educators speak in English, and giving students examples of native tongue sounds compared and contrasted with the target language sounds. With minimal exposure to cooperation with native speakers and variations in L1's phonological organization compared to English, the difficulty posed by pronunciation is evident. All the updated studies clearly show that these issues affect English speakers in general and rely less and less on their original tongue.

Data Augmentation For Sorani Kurdish News Headline Classification Using Back-Translation And Deep Learning Model

With the increase in the volume of news articles and headlines being generated, it is becoming more difficult for individuals to keep up with the latest developments and find relevant news articles in the Kurdish language. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel data augmentation approach for improving the performance of Kurdish news headline classification using back-translation and a proposed deep learning Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model. The approach involves generating synthetic training data by translating Kurdish headlines into a target language in this context English language and back-translating them to the Kurdish language, resulting in an augmented dataset. The proposed BiLSTM model is trained on the augmented data and compared with baseline models SVM (Support-Vector-Machines) and Naïve Bayes an trained on the original data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BiLSTM model outperforms the baseline model and other existing models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Kurdish news headline classification task. The findings suggest that the combination of back-translation and a proposed BiLSTM model is a promising approach for data augmentation in low-resource languages, contributing to the advancement of natural language processing in under-resourced languages. Moreover, having a Kurdish news headline classification model can improve access to news and information for Kurdish speakers. With the classification model, they can easily and quickly search for news articles that interest them based on their preferred categories, such as politics, sports, or entertainment.

Language change among Kalhuri Kurdish speakers in Iran

Abstract In the multicultural and multiethnic context of Iran, Farsi (Persian) is the only official and the most prestigious language employed by the people. This article investigates sociolinguistic factors fostering a radical language shift from Kurdish to Farsi among Kalhuri Kurdish speakers in Kermanshah, the biggest Kurdish city in Iran – a trend which has raised many social and cultural controversies within the Kurdish community. Data were gathered through a questionnaire focusing on the attitudinal, economic, and social factors affecting the shift. The participants of the study were 1,000 native Kurdish speakers in Kermanshah; the data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and item percentage. The analysis revealed that social, personal, and economic factors contributed to the shift, even though the economic concerns outweighed the others. The article discusses the implication of the findings in detail.

In the Name of Traditions: A Comprehensive Study on the impact of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) on women and girls An overview on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting in Iran

A comprehensive study was undertaken to investigate, explore and analyse the existence of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM or FGM/C) in Iran. The timespan of this study began in 2005 and ended in 2014. The aim of this study was to provide in-depth data on FGM in Iran and, at the same time, provide the building blocks for a comprehensive programme to combat FGM in Iran and bring this issue onto the world’s agenda. The methodological approach adopted by this study was primarily participatory, due to the sensitivity of the subject matter. Most parts of this research were completed by the end of 2014, and much has been achieved over a decade of studying the subject of FGM in Iran.The study included travelling thousands of kilometers and interviewing over 3,000 women and 1,000 men from various areas and social classes, including key role players, community leaders, clerics and religious leaders in order to compile comprehensive data about the practice of FGM in Iran. The findings demonstrate that FGM in some locations is widespread among women and girls (around 60% in some villages of Qeshm Island in the southern province of Hurmozgan, especially in the villages of the four provinces in the north-west, west and south of Iran). FGM was not, however, practised in the northern parts of West Azerbaijan, where people are Turkish Azeri and Kurmanji Kurdish speakers, nor in the southern parts of Kermanshah and northern parts of Hormozgan.This research study, along with a short documentary film, has gained global recognition and was launched by The Guardian and the BBC on 4 June 2015 through their websites. Shortly thereafter it was discussed at a United Nations meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, on 19 June 2015 at a session on eliminating FGM. Reuters also published an analysis of the research and considered it one of the rare contributions in the history of Iran.

The Impact of the Evil Side of the English Language on My Life as an Artist

Discussing the English language and its difficult imposition into Kurdish life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Baram positions the Kurdish language as the boundary that marks Kurdish cultural space. He places Kurdish speakers in a precarious interrelationship between globalization and its negative effects, the endangered nature of the Kurdish language and its preservation as key to the cultural survival of the Kurds, and the English language as a problematic tool, necessary for interactions with a global community but laden with imperialistic anti-Middle Eastern and anti-Islamic meanings.

A Cross-cultural study of the speech act of apology by Turkish and Kurdish speakers of English and the native speakers of English

A Cross-cultural study of the speech act of apology by Turkish and Kurdish speakers of English and the native speakers of English

Language Shift Among Speakers of Kalhuri Kurdish in Iran

In the multicultural and multiethnic context of Iran, Farsi is the only official and the most prestigious language. This article investigates sociolinguistic factors fostering a radical language shift from Kalhuri Kurdish to Farsi in Kermanshah, the largest Kurdish city in Iran. This shift has raised many social and cultural controversies within the Kurdish community. Data was gathered through a questionnaire focusing on attitudinal, economic and social factors affecting the shift. The participants were one thousand native Kurdish speakers in Kermanshah. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and item percentage. The findings revealed that social, personal and economic factors contributed to the shift, with economic concerns outweighing the other factors. In discussion and conclusion, we deal with the implications of the findings.

Design and Implementation of a Chatbot for Kurdish Language Speakers Using Chatfuel Platform

Chatbot is a software agent that is used to conduct intelligent conversations between machines and humans. Chatbots are mostly depend on Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this paper, the design and implementation of a chatbot are provided to help Kurdish speakers in using online conversations via texts to find answers instead of direct contact with human agents. The NLP-based software agent is implemented using the Chatfuel platform. Chatfuel uses artificial intelligence to communicate with humans by simulating human conversations through voice commands or texts. The proposed chatbot is tested on an electronic tourist guide that helps visitors to the religious places in the mountainous village of Barzanja that is located in Iraqi Kurdistan. The case study is conducted by using three-hundred questions and answers. One hundred volunteers participated in this study. The participant asks a question and the bot provides an answer if it recognizes the question, otherwise it provides a default answer along with a suggestion of how to use the system properly. The data of these experiment is collected, analyzed, and problems regarding Kurdish language are detected. Designing software agents for processing Kurdish texts faces many challenges. Kurdish texts have not yet been processed using natural language processing (NLP). In addition, Kurdish font disorder and the lack of standardized keyboards and writing styles makes processing Kurdish text difficult. Furthermore, Kurdish language consists of variety of different dialects with different typing styles. In this research, we specifically focus on the design of a software agent for the Central Kurdish (Sorani) dialect. We managed to solve some of the problems related to the Kurdish language and suggest solutions to others.

Diglossia: A Mixed-Mode Survey Analysis on the Use of Formal and Informal Speech among Sorani Kurdish Speakers

Diglossia: A Mixed-Mode Survey Analysis on the Use of Formal and Informal Speech among Sorani Kurdish Speakers

Investigating the Reading Performance of Kurdish Learners of ESL by Using Stroop Test

Stroop test has not been used to examine the reading performance of Kurdish speakers of English as a second language. Therefore, the aim of this study is to use English and Kurdish Stroop tasks to investigate the reading performance of Kurdish Learners of ESL. The six males and three females who participated in this research represent the sample of the study. They read and name Stroop stimuli in each of the six tasks which were divided into two parts; three Kurdish tasks and three English ones. The results of the difference of time and the scores of the Stroop effect show that the time to complete the English tasks was longer than that of the Kurdish tasks, but the Stroop effect is almost equal in both Kurdish and English conditions. Moreover, the overall dominance of Kurdish language affects and facilitates the processing of the Kurdish Stroop tasks. The high reading performance of the participants is also noted and this indicates the suitability of English and Kurdish Stroop tests with Kurdish speakers of English.

Narrative Analysis of The Kurdish Personal Narratives

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.

Globalization of English language: a blessing or curse on Kurdish language

The language we use, like many other things such as sun shine, water, air, rain, sound, food …etc is in a rapid change. Different studies and surveys are found about the number of languages that have disappeared in the last 500 years. At an alarming rate, many languages are dying and many others are reviving all over the world, as Crystal (2000: 1) defines language death as “a language dies when nobody speaks it any more” and this idea is close to Campbell’s (1994) view point when he states that “The loss of a language due to gradual shift to the dominant language in language contact situations”. Kurdish language is an example of a minority language as being surrounded by Persian, Turkish, Arabic and some other majority languages such as English. Kurdish language is not apart from many other languages that are in a critical situation whether to revive or die. As the world becomes more connected, language diversity is falling at an unprecedented rate. Globalization is about human contact. Indeed, the continental, and later global spread of certain languages is the clearest long-term evidence of what global contacts have been achieved. Beside its advantage for some languages to help them becoming the dominant language, yet it helps in polluting the minority languages. The present study is a descriptive analytic study. It aims at knowing whether English language, which is a globalized language, is a curse or blessing to the educated Kurdish language speakers in the age of 15-30 at Kurdistan regional government (KRG)/Garmian province. This is by preparing the descriptive and inferential information, the descriptive data including the age, gender and sentences with choosing a Kurdish or English words. The data showed that there is a rapid increase of using and preferring English words in the daily conversations instead of the Kurdish words. The study found that Kurdish speakers at the age of 15-20 years old are using English words in a higher rate than the ages of 21-25 and 26-30, and higher in 21-25 than 26-30 years old.

DESIGN SPECIAL SCHOOL MATERIAL FOR THE STUDENTS WITH VISUAL DISABILITY USING ( THE KURDISH LANGUAGE FIRST TIME WITH BRAILLE IN THE WORLD ) AND BARCODE TECHNOLOGY

Purpose of the study: It has been presented by the researcher in this paper to be relied upon in the design of curricula for visually impaired people using barcode technology in The Kurdish region and the Kurdish speakers, in this paper the researcher use the Kurdish language with the Braille first time in the world and he hopes to add this language to usage of Braille in the next modifying in UNESCO organization because of it is now the second official language in Iraqi law.
 Methodology: In these study characters of the Kurdish language has been investigated. Students with visual disabilities in the form of various groups gathered to be taught using the signs of Kurdish language. Their progress during this effort has been reported through this article
 Results: Braille is not exclusive to people without another. It is an easy-to-read and writes tool for people with visual impairments. Although the Kurdish population is more than 30 million, their language is not mentioned in the UNESCO Guide until 2018.

On Placement and Removal Events in Ilami Kurdish: A Cognitive-Typological Approach

This paper explores the linguistic characteristics of placement and removal events in Ilami Kurdish and investigates the Goal-over-Source predominance hypothesis in such events. By testing the asymmetry hypothesis in placement vs. removal events, we determined that various predicates are used to encode these events in Ilami Kurdish. Data were collected using a set of video clips including the ‘put and take’ stimuli (Bowerman et al., 2004) with ten Ilami Kurdish speakers, who described the occasions when placement and removal events were required. The results of this first experiment show that there are asymmetric correlations between placement and removal events in terms of verbal predicates. In fact, proportionally more fine-grained types of placement predicates are observed in the descriptions of the Kurdish consultants. Accordingly, it can be concluded that placement events, in comparison with removal events, are cognitively more salient and intricate in the mind of Kurdish speakers, which is directly connected with such linguistic distinctions as properties of the figure, force-dynamic notions, and manner of motion, which are more determinant in placement events than removal events. In the next part of this study, the Goal-over-Source predominance hypothesis was explored in placement and removal events. This hypothesis was tested on the basis of linguistic descriptions as well as a memory task. In the descriptive task, a set of video clips of placement and removal events, including different source and goal paths, was used. Respondents participating in this experiment described each scene after they watched it. In the memory task, participants were asked to watch the scenes of placement and removal events as well as matched events and then judge whether source or goal components can be matched or not. It was found that in these tasks, the goal component was mentioned more often and more accurately matched, respectively. These findings support the Goal-over-Source predominance hypothesis and highlight the cognitive importance of the goal component in placement events compared to the source component in removal events.

Suggestion and Refusal Strategies in English by Kurdish Undergraduate Students

This paper investigated the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence of Kurdish EFL undergraduate students through the speech acts of suggestion and refusal. Eighty-three Kurdish EFL undergraduate students and 14 native speakers of English participated in the study. Data were elicited using a Discourse Completion Task consisting of three suggestive and three refusal situations, and the responses were rated on a scale developed by the researcher. The response data for suggestions and refusals were coded according to the taxonomies of Martinez-Flor (2005) and Beebe et al. (1990), respectively. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 22. Four researchers rated the Kurdish EFL undergraduate students' responses in terms of appropriate pragmatic and linguistic forms. The results of the study revealed differences in the overall strategies and strategy patterns between the responses of Kurdish EFL undergraduate students and Native speakers of English groups, as well as differences between students of state and private universities.

Discourse particles in Kurmanjî Kurdish-Turkish contact

ABSTRACT Exploring interaction among Kurdish speaking family members, this paper investigates the use of discourse particles in Kurmanjî-Kurdish in relation to the contact phenomenon between the Kurdish and Turkish languages. Corpus analysis of data obtained from audio and video recordings of family talk on the phone was carried out to examine semantic-pragmatic properties of discourse particles. Although some particles in the corpus seem to be unique to Kurdish, some others appear to be borrowed from Turkish and integrated into Kurdish by undergoing some phonological changes. The findings suggest that Kurdish speakers borrow some lexical items and integrate them into Kurdish with some changes at phonological level or combine them with some Kurdish particles. Even though Kurdish and Turkish languages have close contact and long-lasting coexistence in the linguistic setting of Turkey, which results in borrowing of some particles from Turkish and their use in daily interaction by Kurdish speakers, it is hard to reach a conclusion about language change at this level. Abbreviations: ADP: Adposition; COP: Copula; DAT: Dative; DP: Discourse Particle; IZF: Izafe; NEG: Negation; OBL: Oblique Case; 1SG: First person singular; OPT. FUT: Optative Future; 2SG: Second person singular; OPT.PRS: Optative Present; 3SG: Third Person singular; PRS: Present; 1PL: First person plural; PROG: Progressive; 2PL: Second person plural; PST: Past; 3PL: Third person plural