LWM 479: Zazaki/Kirmanckî Kurdish

Zazaki/Kirmanckî Kurdish

Gülşat Aygen
Northern Illinois University

This is a descriptive grammar of Zazaki ,also called Kirmancca or Kirmanckî. Zazaki is one of the four dialects of Kurdish. Its motherland is the upper Mesopotamian region, and it is spoken in Eastern Anatolia of Modern Turkey. Zaza diaspora lives mainly in Germany.

There are few reference grammars of any dialect of Kurdish published in English and none on Zazaki. Consequently, this book will be a unique resource as a reference grammar for the wider linguistics community. This book covers the basic phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic structure of Zazaki, and includes some sample texts. The first chapter focuses on the phonetic inventory of Zazaki Kurdish; the second chapter describes the morphological structure: parts of speech and the relevant inflectional morphology. The third chapter presents the Zazaki sentence structure, both simple and complex, including subordinate clauses. Chapter four contains some sample texts, and finally, chapter five lists most commonly used verbs in Zazaki. This grammar relies heavily on both the very few published material on Zazaki, particularly those of Vate Publications and data elicited from native speakers of Zazaki. It adheres to the conventions of the Roman-based alphabet, and to IPA forms where relevant.

ISBN 9783862880157. Languages of the World/Materials 479. 93pp. 2010.