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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.
Introduction to Special Issue
The Kurdish language is an integral component of any conceptualisation of “Kurdishness”, but just what constitutes Kurdish remains highly disputed. In this introduction, we take up a number of key questions relating to Kurdish (e.g. whether it is one or more than one language, which varieties should be considered under Kurdish, what are its origins, etc.), discussing them in the light of contemporary linguistics. A critical assessment of the notions of “language” and “dialect” is followed by a review of different approaches to classifying Kurdish, and exemplified through the case-study of Zazaki. We suggest that a good deal of the confusion arises through a failure to distinguish different kinds of linguistic evidence (in a narrow sense), from the results of socially contracted and negotiated perceptions of identity, rooted in shared belief systems and perceptions of a common history. We then present an overview of recent trends in Kurdish linguistics and attempt to identify some of the most pressing research desiderata.
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.
An applicative analysis of Soranî “absolute prepositions”
Soranî (Central Kurdish) possesses a set of formatives of (pro)nominal and adpositional origin that combine with a verbal stem to introduce an additional pronominal indexed argument. Based on the definition used in this volume, these formatives fit neatly under the umbrella of applicative markers. However, they have only recently been described as such (Karim and Salehi 2020). Instead, traditional grammars have labeled these formatives “absolute prepositions,” a term that acknowledges their sometimes adpositional origin and their phonological similarity to synchronic adpositions. This study outlines the distribution of Soranî applicatives, their integration into the alignment system, and the formal differences between adpositional phrases and applicative constructions. Additionally, we provide a diachronic account of Soranî applicative markers. We show that they are likely just the latest stage in a grammaticalization cycle which took place several times in the history of Soranî.