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Gorani in its historical and linguistic context

Kommentare deaktiviert für Gorani in its historical and linguistic context

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

Approaches to Corpus Creation for Low-Resource Language Technology: the Case of Southern Kurdish and Laki

Kommentare deaktiviert für Approaches to Corpus Creation for Low-Resource Language Technology: the Case of Southern Kurdish and Laki

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.


											
																					

									

																	

										

											

												Towards a dialectology of Southern Kurdish: Where to begin?
											

											

												
													
												
												
												
													Kommentare deaktiviert für 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 Dialects of Kurdish
											

											

												
													
												
												
												
													Kommentare deaktiviert für The Dialects of Kurdish												
												
																								
																								
																							

										

										
																				
										

											




The project aims to provide a comparative structural and typological survey of the dialect continuum of Kurdish, covering sample locations from across the major Kurdish speaking regions between the eastern Anatolian regions of Turkey, through northern Syria and Iraq and on to north-eastern Iran. The varieties covered include primarily those known as Kurmanji-Bahdini (Northern Kurdish) and Sorani (Central Kurdish), with some limited coverage of varieties belonging to the group known as Southern Kurdish.


The survey covers selected structures in lexicon, phonology and lexical phonology, morphology, and morpho-syntax, with a strong focus on the interaction of morphological alignment with verb semantics.


The data obtained through the survey’s questionnaire elicitation are presented in a Database that can be searched by location, structural tag, English translation of the elicitation phrase, and Kurdish word forms. For more information on the elicitation method please consult the Pilot and extended survey page.


A collection of Maps present the geographical distribution of selected variants that have been extracted from the questionnaire database.


A set of Free Speech Samples are presented in the form of audio files accompanied by a transliteration and English translation, and are linked to the Database entries that document the results of questionnaire elicitation with the same speakers. These are short samples of typically around 5 minutes that have been extracted from longer stretches of recordings of connected speech. The topics covered include biographical narration about village life, customs and traditions, and local history, as well as traditional tales, and provide a rich resource, so far unparalleled online, of documentation of Kurdish cultural traditions presented by ordinary people from across the Kurdish speaking regions, in their own local dialects.


The academic evaluation of the project data is currently underway (2017), led by the project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Yaron Matras, with the participation of a group of international leading researchers in Kurdish linguistics.





											
																					

									

																	
																	

										

											

												Current issues in Kurdish linguistics
											

											

												
													
												
												
												
													Kommentare deaktiviert für Current issues in Kurdish linguistics												
												
																								
																								
																							

										

										
																				
										

											
This volume contains a selection of contributions originally presented at the Third International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics (ICKL3), University of Amsterdam, in August 2016

											
																					

									

																	

										

											

												The Laki variety of Harsin
											

											

												
													
												
												
												
													Kommentare deaktiviert für 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

											
																					

									

																	

										

											

												Introduction to Special Issue
											

											

												
													
												
												
												
													Kommentare deaktiviert für 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.