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
Kurdische Grammatik
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
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.
Kurmancca ile karşılaştırmalı kırmancca (zazaca) dilbilgisi
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 Blevins’ (2017) model of “perceptual magnets,” this effect is held to have emerged on a model of Arabic pharyngeals as external “perceptual magnets” for native speakers of Kurdish who had extensive exposure to Arabic sound patterns.
Great Expectations, Trivialised Gains
Multilingualism is being embraced more and more rhetorically in Germany, yet the language policy approach put into practice in schools shows a hierarchical order within which languages are treated unequally. While some are viewed favourably, some others are either marginalised or largely ignored. Analysing the newly introduced Kurdish heritage language teaching in Berlin, this article seeks to explore how language hierarchies function in schools and how teaching Kurdish is confined by such hierarchies. Drawing on field notes and observations collected as part of a larger project, the article pinpoints the structural limitations and challenges faced by Kurdish heritage language instruction in Berlin and why it might contribute to the reproduction of hierarchical attitudes towards multilingualism rather than challenge them