| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The grammar and the texts composing the present book are products of the fieldwork I undertook in the Mukriyan region of Iranian Kurdistan within the frame of my doctoral research between 2009 and 2013. Many people and organizations contributed to the completion of that research. I would first like to express my gratitude to the native speakers from Mahabad and Şino (Oshnaviyeh) towns of Iranian Kurdistan, who hosted me, befriended me, and provided me with extensive data. My heartfelt thanks to my hosts and informants Salah Payanyani and Mihemmed Ehmediazer, together with their families, who helped me with unfailing patience in all respects of a relatively long period of fieldwork. When I set out to Mukriyan, I was thinking that I would be doing a service to the study of the oral literature of the region, in addition to documenting its dialect, yet I found that many talented researchers who were native to that culture had already conducted extensive high quality work on oral literature. I was fortunate enough to become friends with many of them and to profit from their rich knowledge of the local oral traditions. Many of those friends in Mahabad, Nexede, and Şino might prefer to remain anonymous, but I would like to mention at least their first names, as an effort to acknowledge their support and friendship: Kak (Mr.) Rehber, Mam (Uncle) Qadir, Mam Osman, Kak Mustefa, Kak Ehmed, Kak Suleyman, Kak Rehman, Kak Mustefa, Kak Suad, Kak Sakar, Kak Mensur, Kak Nasir, Kak Suware, Kak Ibrahim. This book is dedicated to the people of Mukriyan and to those self-trained researchers and intellectuals from Mukriyan, who have selflessly engaged in researching and preserving the regional culture.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my two PhD supervisors, Professor François Jacquesson and Professor Geoffrey Haig. I benefited extensively from their meticulous guidance and intellectual support. I believe that they will be pleased to see this grammar and text collection appear, as it foregrounds the speech community and is also accessible to the community members. In the jury at my PhD defense, my supervisors were accompanied by additional members to whom I would also like to extend my gratitude: Claude Hagêge, Agnes Kom, Annie Montaut, Pollet Samvelian, and Frank Seifart.
I received financial support for my doctoral research from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through the intermediary of the Kurdish Institute of Paris. I am grateful to both of these institutions for having provided me with this opportunity. I would like to express my gratitude to my research institution, Langues et Civilisations a Tradition Orale (LACITO) of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). LACITO provided me with an office and logistic support during my studies, while it was also thanks to the generous grants from LACITO that I was able to conduct fieldwork during three trips to Iranian Kurdistan. I am also grateful for the support I received from my two universities, the Doctoral School 268 of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 in France and the Fakultät Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften of the Otto-Friedrich-Universitat Bamberg in Germany.
I would like to thank all of my colleagues and friends from LACITO and the University of Bamberg, from whom I learned a lot while also enjoying a shared working space. For their help with various technical matters, I would like to thank Jean-Michel Roynard (LACITO), Christian Chanard (LLACAN), and Jêröme Picard (CNRS de Villejuif).
In the preparation of this volume, Denise Bailey shared her extensive expertise in text presentation and edited the English of the manuscript. Stevan Vanderwerf kindly helped me with the technical work in preparing the lexicon in LexiquePro. I am deeply grateful for their unconditional expert assistance. Finally, I am thankful to Prof. Nicholas Sims-Williams for accepting this work to be published in the series Beitrage zur Iranistik and for his various comments and corrections to the manuscript.
Chapter 1
Background to the Language, Community, And Fieldwork
1.1 Introduction
The present work is a grammatical description of the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish accompanied by a ’collection of texts and a brief lexicon. More theoretical aspects of person marking and argument indexation patterns in Central Kurdish are presented in a companion volume currently being prepared for publication (Öpengin forthc.) Central Kurdish, more widely known as Sorani, is one of the major varieties of Kurdish, itself a branch of Western Iranian languages (cf Kom 2003) Central Kurdish is spoken in Iraq and Iran by the majority of the Kurdish population in these two countries McCarus (2009:587) estimates the number of its speakers as around 5 million, while in Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013) the number is more specifically stated as 6,750,000. This background chapter presents the language and the speech community under study (§1.2); the position of the variety within Kurdish dialectology (§1.3); a synopsis of previous work (§1.4); a description of the fieldwork and data collection process (§1.5), and a presentation of the corpus of this study (§1.6).
1.2 Mukri Central Kurdish and its speech community
Mukri (more precisely Mukï) or Mukriyani is the indigenous name for the variety of Central Kurdish spoken in the northern half of the Central Kurdish speech area in Iran. Figure 1 shows the speech zone of Mukri within (Central) Kurdish and with respect to its contact languages. Mahabad (also called Sablax1), the historical and current sociopolitical center of the region, is the principal city of the dialect area. Other important towns in the speech zone of Mukri are Bokan, Sardasht (Kr. Serdeşt), Piranshahr (Kr. Pîranşehr and Xanê), Naqadeh (Kr. Nexede), Shino or Oshnaviyeh (Kr. Şino), and Miandoab. The only extant statistics Lewis et al (2013) put the number of Central Kurdish speakers in Iran as 3,250,000, approximately one third of which (i.e. more than one million) could be considered as speakers of Mukri. However, both of the estimates are meant to be provisional and should thus be treated with due caution.
The term “Mukri” is obtained from the name of the principality of Mukriyan, which ruled in the region from the late fourteenth to the late nineteenth century.2 The names “Mukri” and “Mukriyani” denote provenance from the region, in addition to referring to the variety of Central Kurdish spoken there. We will refer to it as “Mukri” or “Mukri Kurdish”.
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1 This name comes from the name of the river Sauj-boulagh (or Sauj-bulaq), originally a Turkie name, which was replaced by Mahabad during the nationalist Pahlavi regime (Minorsky 1957:65), more precisely, in 1935 (Vali 2011:26).
2 See Hassanpour (1989), but also Oberling (2010) and Minorsky (1957:73-74). |
