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
About:
Gorani refers to under-documented, endangered varieties spoken in a cluster within the Zagros mountains (Iran/Iraq). These varieties possess conservative features of importance to linguists. However, their study has been plagued by nomenclature and taxonomy issues. Traditional names for these languages have been supplanted first by orientalists‘ prescriptions and then by their linguist heirs. Inaccurate terminology has sewn discord between speaker communities, disturbing the sociolinguistic landscape. This volume represents the state of the art of Gorani’s historical and socio-linguistics, documentation, and literature, as well as an effort to aid the „decolonization“ of Gorani linguistics.
Contents:
- Shuan Osman Karim & Saloumeh Gholami: Gorani in its historical and linguistic context
- Saeed Karami & Saloumeh Gholami: Examining the structural differences and similarities between literary Gorani and Hawrami through the lens of diglossiaby
- Parvin Mahmoudveysi: The Gūrānī variety of Bzɫāna and the literary language of Saydī
- Hamidreza Nikravesh: Judeo-Gūrānī: Tracing the emergence of a literary corpus
- Geoffrey Khan & Masoud Mohammadirad. Gorani influence on NENA
- Shuan Osman Karim: Pattern borrowing/convergence in the Southern Kurdish Zone
- Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand: The Laki of the Ahl-e Haqq community in Češin: Some morphosyntactic features
- Mahîr Dogan: Problems in Zazakî nomenclature
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to update existing views on the Zazaki dialectology and answer these two questions: Are the Zazas Kurds? Is Zazaki Kurdish? To answer this question, methods of comparative linguistics and perceptual dialectology are used. The first part of this article deals with the background of Zaza studies. The second part, based on the perspectives of perceptual dialectology, attempts to provide a clear picture of the complex status of the identity of the Zazas from emic and etic perspectives. The third section focuses on comparative linguistics research and examines a number of typologically marked grammatical characteristics in several Iranian languages that are important for studying the classification of Zazaki. The last section provides a conclusion and answers the two main questions of this research.
Abstract
Modernism is the mind-set that keeps pace with social change with an innovative perspective by taking advantage of the developments in science, culture and politics since the 17th century. The modern clings to the new and contemporary. Modernism is also known as literature and art movement. Modern literary genres address issues such as human loneliness, troubles, dead ends, reality, consciousness and subconscious in the axis of ‘national, freedom, human subject and social
events’.
Modern literature rejects traditional structure and expression and tries to adapt the new style to the understanding of the day. In modern literary works, there are the conflicts of the value of the society, the crises of the people, the sophisticated mood, the rebellion to the established values and a realistic and allegorical expression.
Modern literature, which has been effective in Western literature from the 17th century, has been active in Turkish literature from the second half of the 19th century. In Zaza literature, which gave written literature products for a variety of reasons at a late time, the modern effect has been seen since the 1980s. This effect became evident in the 1990s and reached a framework that could be called Modern Zaza literature after the 2000s.
In modern Zaza literature, over 40 years, all kinds of modern literature have been written. Among these genres, examples of poetry, stories and novels are more and more apparent. These species emerge in the shadow of many problems such as mother tongue, ideology, regional conditions, and literacy by Zaza.
This study deals with modern Zaza literature within the framework of determinations and general evaluations about genres such as poetry, story and novel. The study also emphasises the development process, effect and content of each genre in Zaza literature.
Abstract
Languages have different features. These features make languages different from each other. Languages in the Indo-European language family have some features that other language families do not. One of them is gender. Even though gender has disappeared in languages such as Soranca and Persian, it continues to exist in Zazaki and Kurmanji. Gender is one of the basic features of languages and consists of two parts. Natural sex is naturally found in names. Natural sex is classified as feminine and masculine; It consists of prefixes and suffixes. It expresses man- and dele- in prefixes. It is not difficult to determine natural sex. This type of gender is determined by whether the words are masculine or feminine. The second part of gender is gramatical gender. It is difficult to determine the grammatical gender. This difficulty arises from the determination of the sex of the words. There is no consensus in grammatical gender in zazaki. The gender of the words varies from region to region. Although there is no problem in gramatical gender in everyday language, the gender of the word in written language is a problem for the author. In this study, the sexes of the words in Zazaki language are divided into two as natural gender and gramatical gender. Then, natural gender is explained with examples, prefixes and suffixes. There are some basic features in gramatical gender. In this study, these rules and features will be explained and examples of books, dictionaries and folkloric materials will be given. The purpose of this study is to explain gender in Zazaki, to determine the rules for determining the gender in words. The words entered into Zazaki from other languages were examined in this study in terms of gender. In this study, it has been given importance to use folkloric texts. Dictionaries that reflect local sayings are important sources for this study.
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.
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.
The aim of this paper is to look at some of the problems with the traditional subdivisions of Iranian and at possible new approaches. It builds on an argument made in Korn (2016a), adding discussion and further illustrating problems in the data and methods involved in the traditional model of relations among the Iranian languages. It specifically points out that the traditional family tree is based on a set of isoglosses that is an artefact of the data that happened to be available at the time. In addition, the question arises whether the wave model or the concept of linguistic areas would be more adequate to account for the data. The discovery of a corpus of Bactrian manuscripts encourages a new approach. I argue that a sub-branch including Bactrian, Parthian and some other languages is a hypothesis that deserves to be tested; at the same time, the comparison with other Iranian languages as well as typological considerations permit to assess the role of language contact.
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.