Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish

Yaron Matras is former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK. He led the research project on Structural and Typological Variation in the Dialects of Kurdish (2014-2017) and the creation of the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects. His research interests include contact linguistics and urban multilingualism, and the linguistics of Romani and of languages of the Middle East.

Geoffrey L. J. Haig is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Bamberg, Germany. He has published extensively on Kurdish and neighbouring languages, focussing on diachrony and areal linguistics, and is the co-founder of Multi-CAST, an online accessible resource for corpus-based typology.

Ergin Opengin is a Lecturer at the University of Kurdistan-Hewle r, Iraq. His research focuses on the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of Kurdish. He is the author of The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish (Reichert Verlag, 2016), and co-editor of Current Issues in Kurdish Linguistics (Bamberg University Press, 2019).

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. 

1. Introduction; Yaron Matras, Geoffrey Haig, Ergin Öpengin.- 2. Lexical Variation And Semantic Change Across Kurdish; Jaffer Sheyholislami And Rahim Surkhi.- 3. Phonological Variation In Kurdish; Erik Anonby.- 4. Case In Kurdish; Songül Gündogdu.- 5. Pronominal Clitics Across Kurdish: Areal Distribution, Structural Variation, And Diachrony; Ergin Öpengin And Masoud Mohammadirad.- 6. A Cross-Dialect Account Of Kurdish Past Tense Categories, With Special Reference To Southern Kurdish; Sara Belelli.- 7. Adpositions In Kurdish; Maximilian Kinzler.- 8. Post-Predicate Constituents In Kurdish; Geoffrey Haig.- 9. The Typology Of Connectivity And Complex Constructions In Kurdish Dialects; Yaron Matras.