This study is a detailed grammatical description of the Gūrānī language as used in the village of Gawrajū, located near the town of Gahvāre in the province of Kermānšāh, Iran. Gūrānī is genetically classified as a North-West Iranian language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Gūrānī is of particular historical significance especially as it was the language of the court of the Kurdish Ardalān principality (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries). This grammatical description of Gawrajū Gūrānī (‘Gawrajūyī’) is based on spoken material from a corpus of twelve texts. The study is written from primarily a functional-typological theoretical framework. It presents the main structures and word classes, as well as a selection of functional systems and the use of certain structures. One chapter focuses on issues of Information Structure. There are also observations about linguistic variation within Gūrānī.
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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 Fattah’s (2000: 9) proposed dialect classifcation, and complements it with the evaluation of language data from older sources, the author’s own research in Kermānshāh Province and other documentation activities recently carried out in the SK-speaking area, sketching possible directions for future research.
The Laki variety of Harsin
This book presents a documentation and analysis of Harsini, the language variety spoken by the people of Harsin, a small urban centre located in south-east Kermānshāh Province, western Iran. The main features of phonology and morphosyntax are outlined, and an extensive corpus of transcribed spoken texts, recorded in situ, is also provided, together with a lexicon. The book also includes comparative notes and discussion of the place of Harsini within Laki, and its relationship to Southern Kurdish. The sound files from the text corpus are available online at https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de/resources/kurdish/#laki