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The Dialects of Kurdish

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The project aims to provide a comparative structural and typological survey of the dialect continuum of Kurdish, covering sample locations from across the major Kurdish speaking regions between the eastern Anatolian regions of Turkey, through northern Syria and Iraq and on to north-eastern Iran. The varieties covered include primarily those known as Kurmanji-Bahdini (Northern Kurdish) and Sorani (Central Kurdish), with some limited coverage of varieties belonging to the group known as Southern Kurdish.

The survey covers selected structures in lexicon, phonology and lexical phonology, morphology, and morpho-syntax, with a strong focus on the interaction of morphological alignment with verb semantics.

The data obtained through the survey’s questionnaire elicitation are presented in a Database that can be searched by location, structural tag, English translation of the elicitation phrase, and Kurdish word forms. For more information on the elicitation method please consult the Pilot and extended survey page.

A collection of Maps present the geographical distribution of selected variants that have been extracted from the questionnaire database.

A set of Free Speech Samples are presented in the form of audio files accompanied by a transliteration and English translation, and are linked to the Database entries that document the results of questionnaire elicitation with the same speakers. These are short samples of typically around 5 minutes that have been extracted from longer stretches of recordings of connected speech. The topics covered include biographical narration about village life, customs and traditions, and local history, as well as traditional tales, and provide a rich resource, so far unparalleled online, of documentation of Kurdish cultural traditions presented by ordinary people from across the Kurdish speaking regions, in their own local dialects.

The academic evaluation of the project data is currently underway (2017), led by the project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Yaron Matras, with the participation of a group of international leading researchers in Kurdish linguistics.

Kurmanji complementation

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Kurmanji clause-linking devices are generally a) finite, and b) subject to variation in respect of the choice of morphological device that marks the link. There are several options for marking complement clauses in the language: zero-marking (paratactic apposition of clauses), mood, simple and complex complementisers, and reinforcement of subject agreement through deictics and anaphora. The paper discusses the distribution of clause-linking devices, based on their occurrence in a corpus of tape-recorded and transcribed conversational narratives. The findings are related to the predictions on semantic-typological universale of complementation. A brief discussion of the areal position of Kurmanji follows, in conclusion of which I propose that the principal isogloss shared by the languages under discussion is their reliance on finite verbs even in the most tightly-integrated complex constructions.

Kurdish linguistics: a brief overview

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A perennial problem for Kurdish linguistics is the fragmented nature of the field. There is a lack of reliable general introductory texts, and a lack of a common forum for exchanging research results. Linguists beginning work on Kurdish are obliged to stumble their way through a variety of sources, often of obscure origin and some of doubtful reliability. One of the aims of this contribution is to bring together a broad range of previously published scholarship in the hope that future researchers will be able to widen the relevance of their findings by relating them to existent material. We also provide a highly condensed account of what we believe are central issues in Kurdish linguistics, and offer some pointers for future research in the field.

Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish

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This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.