Research Questions of this thesis:

1) Under which circumstances do adpositional complements receive oblique
case marking?
2) Is animacy the sole determining factor or does definiteness play a role as
well?
3) Are there any regional differences for above-mentioned determiners?

For this purpose, 25 speakers of Zazakî have been interviewed using a translation task questionnaire that tests a subset of frequent adpositions with animate and inanimate nouns in different states of referentiality (definite or indefinite). Due to reasons of scope, the research at hand focuses on the Northern Dialect of the regions Dêrsim (Tunceli), Gimgim (Varto), and to some extent Qoçgîrî. After
introducing the language, its speakers, the numerous existing ethnonyms and glossonyms in Section 2, a theoretical overview of adpositional case marking, also known as flagging, are given both in a general sense and for Zazakî in particular in Section 3. Furthermore, the various effects of animacy and definiteness on differential case marking are examined. Section 4 describes the scope and methods of data gathering, the questionnaire design, and data evaluation necessary to address the research questions. The final results and a discussion are offered in Section 5. The results show the effects of animacy and definiteness per each adposition and complement before presenting the concluding remarks in Section 6.