The present study targets language choice and language attitudes among Kurdish speakers in the multi-lingual city of Duhok (Kurdistan Region of Iraq). While the main language of wider communication in Duhok city is the Bahdini dialect of Kurmanji, several languages (Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic, and English) have been used as the language of instruction in education during different periods of time, yielding an age-graded, multi-lingual community. Within such a community, diferent languages are selected for diferent settings (with diferent interlocutors, and in diferent contexts), and exercising language choice seems to be a natural, automatic and unplanned process, with obvious parallels to the choice of an appropriate register, genre, style, medium, or tone of voice in any communicative setting (Dweik & Qawar 2015). To date, no empirical sociolinguistic research of this nature has been conducted in Duhok, or indeed in any urban center of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In this chapter, we present the frst results of an ongoing research project that focuses on the sociolinguistic variable of age, across a variety of attitudinal and usage-based parameters.
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Asymmetries in Kurmanji morphosyntax
The current paper aims to investigate diferent morphosyntactic realization of the constituents (case vs. adposition) and their linear ordering (preverbal vs. postverbal) in a Kurmanji clause through an event structure analysis. Based on the data from MuĆ Kurmanji (MK), it discusses that there is a relation between the morphological form of the constituents and their status as encoded in the verbâs meaning in MK; that is, structural participants are realized with case morphology while constant participants are introduced with adpositions. It further argues that the reason why MK makes a distinction in the linear ordering of structural participants is indeed a word-order property (VG) retained from proto-Kurdish and further constrained by the morphosyntactic properties of Kurmanji
Pharyngeals in Kurmanji Kurdish
A noteworthy feature of a number of Western Iranian languages, including Kurmanji Kurdish, is the presence of contrastive pharyngeal sounds in inherited vocabulary. These pharyngeals are considered by many linguists working on Kurdish to be the result of contact with Arabic, coming into the language through Arabic loan vocabulary (Haig & Matras 2002). The Arabic contact source of these sounds seems likely, particularly given the fact that most of the Western Iranian languages which contain pharyngeals are in contact with Arabic at present or historically.
However, as I demonstrate, the distribution of the majority of contrastive pharyngeals in inherited Iranian vocabulary in Kurmanji does not suggest a mere surface imitation of Arabic vocabulary, but a Kurmanji-internal phonological process modulated by familiarity with the phonetics of Arabic pharyngeals. A newly-identified sound pattern presented here is the association of what are arguably pharyngealized vowel phonemes in Kurmanji with pre-existing labial consonants and constraints determined by Kurmanji phonotactics. Following Blevinsâ (2017) model of âperceptual magnets,â this effect is held to have emerged on a model of Arabic pharyngeals as external âperceptual magnetsâ for native speakers of Kurdish who had extensive exposure to Arabic sound patterns.
Towards a dialectology of Southern Kurdish: Where to begin?
This contribution provides an overview of the current state of knowledge on the dialectology of Southern Kurdish (hereafter SK). The introductory paragraphs discuss the concept of SK, survey existing sources and briefy address core issues of terminology. The bulk of the study reviews Fattahâs (2000: 9) proposed dialect classifcation, and complements it with the evaluation of language data from older sources, the authorâs own research in KermÄnshÄh Province and other documentation activities recently carried out in the SK-speaking area, sketching possible directions for future research.