Abstract
Gorani refers alternately to a subgroup of the Iranian languages spoken in the borderlands between Iraq and Iran with small islands of speakers stippling the map from the Iranian border to Nineveh or to a literary standard used widely until the decline of the Ardalan dynasty in the 19th century. Here, we explore both these uses of the term to understand the place of Gorani varieties among the regional languages. The role of Gorani has, at times, been the local idiom of minoritized groups or a prestigious literary standard. Gorani and its speakers have substantially impacted its neighbors, including Neo-Aramaic, Southern and Central Kurdish, and Laki. It has been the chosen literary language and spoken vernacular of various religious groups. The conservative character of Gorani varieties has made it essential to understand Iranian dialectology. Here, we explore all aspects of Gorani, explicitly focusing on its diachronic and sociolinguistic developments and the history of its study.
Published in Gorani in its historical and linguistic context
One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages.
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
This paper aims at verifying the traditional set of phonetic changes, defined by D. N. Mackenzie as the main distinctive feature of the Kurdish dialects, with regard to Lakī having yet no clear affiliation in the Iranian dialectology. It is usually considered to be a dialect of Kurdish, sometimes a transitional dialect between Kurdish and Luri, and even a separate idiom.