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.
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Kurdische Grammatik
Language choice and patterns of usage among Kurdish speakers of Duhok
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.
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 Muş Kurmanji (MK), it discusses that there is a relation between the morphological form of the constituents and their status as encoded in the verb’s 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
On the linguistic history of Kurdish
Historical linguistic sources of Kurdish date back just a few hundred years, thus it is not possible to track the profound grammatical changes of Western Iranian languages in Kurdish. Through a comparison with attested languages of the Middle Iranian period, this paper provides a hypothetical chronology of grammatical changes. It allows us to tentatively localise the approximate time when modern varieties separated with regard to the respective grammatical change. In order to represent the types of linguistic relationship involved, distinct models of language contact and language continua are set up.
Bîblîyografyaya Tezên Master û Doktorayê yên Beşên Ziman û Edebiyata Kurdî û Ziman û Çanda Kurdî (2012-2020)
Kurdisch Wort für Wort
This Kurdish language guide introduces the official standard variant of the Kurmancî dialect, spoken in Eastern Turkey and also in Syria. This written language has been developed only in recent decades but has already gained wide popularity due to the increasing use of Kurdish in the media in recent times
Sociolinguistic situation of Kurdish in Turkey
This article aims at exploring the minority status of Kurdish language in Turkey. It asks two main questions: (1) In what ways have state policies and socio-historical conditions influenced the evolution of linguistic behavior of Kurdish speakers? (2) What are the mechanisms through which language maintenance versus language shift tendencies operate in the speech community? The article discusses the objective dimensions of the language situation in the Kurdish region of Turkey. It then presents an account of daily language practices and perceptions of Kurdish speakers. It shows that language use and choice are significantly related to variables such as age, gender, education level, rural versus urban dwelling and the overall socio-cultural and political contexts of such uses and choices. The article further indicates that although the general tendency is to follow the functional separation of languages, the language situation in this context is not an example of stable diglossia, as Turkish exerts its increasing presence in low domains whereas Kurdish, by contrast, has started to infringe into high domains like media and institutions. The article concludes that the prevalent community bilingualism evolves to the detriment of Kurdish, leading to a shift-oriented linguistic situation for Kurdish.
The indivisibility of the nation and its linguistic divisions
Kurdish has four “geographical” dialects divided arbitrarily and forcibly among five neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia. It has three literary dialects, two standardizing varieties, numerous norms and three alphabets. Further complicating this linguistic landscape since 1918 is the crisscrossing of dialect areas by international borders and subjecting them to state policies ranging from linguicide (Turkey, Iran, Syria) to officialization on the local (Iraq before 2005; USSR) and national levels (Iraq since 2005). Under these conditions, dialect divisions were overshadowed by the linguicidal situation which threatened the survival of the language. The formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government in 1991 and the officialization of Kurdish as one of the two state languages of Iraq in 2005 have removed the external (state) threat, and raised, once more, the question of the dialect base of the standard language. While Iraqi rulers had in the past used dialect pluralism as justification for denying Kurdish official status, now the Kurds themselves have to cope with the linguistic fragmentation of their nation. This article examines the conflict over the adoption of one or two of the major dialects, Sorani and Kurmanji, as the official standard language in Iraq.