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.
Archives
The Dialects of Kurdish
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.
Syllable structure and stress in Bahdinani Kurdish
This paper presents some facts related to the syllable structure and the stress system of Bahdinani, a subdialect of Kurmanji Kurdish spoken in Iraq. Bahdinani does not have a complicated syllable structure or stress system. The strict conditions on complex consonant combinations and the high compliance of the available clusters with the sonority principle make its syllable structure rather simple. The strict ultimacy principle of stress placement, the binary iambic pattern of feet and the quantity-insensitive nature of stress assignment are basic characteristics of Bahdinani stress system. These facts are presented within the framework of distinctive features and Optimality Theory.
Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish
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.