Folklore-collecting initiatives in Turkey and Iran have become increasingly popular over the past decade. In this article we present a historical overview of folklore-collecting practices and focus on more recent developments in this field. While Kurdish folklore has been perceived as a cornerstone of Kurdish national identity and as a source of information on Kurdish history, today’s collectors in Turkey and Iran understand its role in a wider context of language revitalization and indigenous knowledge production. Collecting oral traditions in the Kurdish dialects of Kurmanji, Sorani, and Zazaki is appreciated as a step towards protecting and developing the Kurdish language, which is endangered by language assimilation policies in both countries. Reviving folkloric vocabulary, stories, and traditional knowledge practices such as agricultural teachings, folklore collectors revive and promote indigenous knowledge production, and enrich education and research. Drawing on language revitalization theories and indigenous knowledge production, this article offers insights into unexplored aspects of collecting, archiving, and publishing Kurdish folklore in recent years.
Archives
The Gorani language of Zarda, a village of West Iran
The Gorani language of Gawrajū, a village of West Iran
Kurdish in Iran: A case of restricted and controlled tolerance
It has been claimed that the 1979 revolution in Iran transformed the country in many respects. This article aims to examine the extent to which the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has deviated, if at all, from the linguicidal policies of the Pahlavi dynasty towards non-Persian languages in Iran. The article finds, in both the monarchical and IRI regimes, a policy of (a) treating multilingualism as a threat to the country’s territorial integrity and national unity, (b) restricting the use of non-Persian languages, and (3) promoting the supremacy of Persian as a venue for unifying the ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous body politic. While the continuity in the language policy of the two regimes is prominent, dif–ferences will be noted especially in the changing geolinguistic context of the region where Kurdish has achieved the status of an official language in Iraq (since 2005) and has enjoyed some level of tolerance in the linguicidal Turkish state (since 1991). New communication technologies as well as cross-border social and linguistic networking among the Kurds throughout Kurdistan and the world have changed the language environment but not the official policy of “one-nation = one-language”. Persianization of non-Persian peoples continues to be the build–ing block of the Islamic regime’s language policy
The History and Development of Literary Central Kurdish
There are about eight million speakers of Central Kurdish (Sorani) in Iran and Iraq. Unlike Iran, in Iraq the language enjoys an official status at both regional (Kurdistan Regional Government) and federal levels. This chapter presents a chronological history of the emergence, development and standardization of written Central Kurdish in Kurdistan (Iran and Iraq) and diasporas. It underlines language planning achievements to date and the challenges the language faces in terms of corpus planning, status and recognition and acquisition planning (its teaching and learning). Debates over what this variety should be called and a detailed breakdown of the population of its speakers are presented.
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.
Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI)
The Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) brings together insights from linguists in Iran and internationally, statistical and demographic publications by national agencies, and, foundationally, speakers of the many languages and dialects of the country. Rather than communicating a single view of Iran’s languages and dialects, the Atlas allows users to enrich their own perspectives on language distribution with location-based language data.
The searchable maps highlight patterns in the phonology (the sounds of language), morphosyntax (grammar) and lexicon (words) of Iran’s languages. Users can access, contribute and comment on language data, which are organized in reference to each of the country’s some 60,000 towns and cities.