This book is a collection of 15 narratives in Hewramî. It offers a unique window into the life of Hewramî speakers, including their oral and social history, social relations, recollections of past life, and storytelling traditions. The stories were told by five narrators. All the stories have been transcribed, translated, annotated, and analysed. The volume contains an introduction that provides an overview of the language and speech community. The texts are presented in two formats: as parallel column texts (Hewramî/English) and as interlinearised glossed texts, containing detailed linguistic analysis. Many of the narratives contain elements of hagiographies, focusing on moral lessons.
II Texts / 21 A zaroɫe û bizê (ZB) ‘The baby and the goat’ / 23 B zaroɫe û qiřolû darî (ZQ) ‘The baby and the tree hollow’ / 41 C herbene (HB) ‘Donkey keeper’ / 57 D peɫê merekuř (PM) ‘A swarm of grasshoppers’ / 79 E derdû gulî (DG) ‘Leprosy’ / 95 F Şêx ʕumer û Cafir san (ŞC) ‘Sheikh Omar and Jafer San’ / 115 G duwê padşɛ (DP) ‘Two kings’ / 141 H jîwayû Pîr şelîyarî (JP) ‘Pir Shaliyar’s life’ / 157 I zemawinew Pîr şelîyarî (ZP) ‘Pir Shaliyar’s wedding ceremony’ / 223 J babaw Pîr şelîyarî (BP) ‘Pir Shaliyar’s grandfather’ / 257 K kuřû şuwaney (KŞ) ‘The shepherd’s son’ / 313 L jîwayû Heyasî (JH) ‘Hayas’s life’ / 343 M řisûmatû ewsayma (RE) ‘Our past traditions’ / 371 N jîwayû ewsayma (JE) ‘Our life in the past’ / 389 O jîwayû min (JM) ‘My life’ / 409
References / 425
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a collection of 15 narratives from the Tekst variety of Hewramî. The material for this book was mainly gathered in August 2022 in the Hewraman region of Iranian Kurdistan while I was conducting fieldwork for my grammar of Hewramî. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the following narrators in Hewraman Tekht: Mohammad, Amin, Saleh, Hanifa, and Moʿmen. The book wouldn’t have been possible without their openness to share stories about their lives and different socio-historical aspects of the region. It is my hope that this work does justice to their language and heritage.
I would also like to thank my colleague Katherine Hodgson for offering help with checking the English translation of the texts. Katherine patiently looked into the English with me on multiple rounds to ensure that the English translation reflected the Hewramî structures as closely as possible. I am equally grateful to Shuan Osman Karim for converting the glossed texts in FLEX into the specific formatting required for linguistic examples by Language Science Press using a Python script.
Special thanks to Christian Döhler for accepting the book for inclusion in the Open Text Collections series. Christian went out of his way to offer help with typesetting the book and provided valuable insights about the structure and formatting of texts. Thanks are due to Sebastian Nordhoff for his technical support and Matthew Korte for proofreading the monograph. Matthew carefully identified inconsistences in the punctuation and alignment issues in the glosses. Funded by the European Union (ERC, alhome, 101021183). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Part I
Background
1 Preliminaries
1.1 Introduction
The high mountainous Hewraman region, located between Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan, is home to a unique linguistic and cultural profile. The people of the area speak Hewramî, a member of the Gorani branch of Iranian languages, closely akin to the neighbouring Kurdish. Religiously, the region is characterised by affiliation with Sunni Islam and its Sufi orders, specifically Naghshbandi and Qaderi. Historically, the greater Hewraman region has been home to the esoteric faith of Yarsan (or Ahl-e Hagh). The Sufi masters, whom the locals call pîrs, traditionally exerted spiritual authority in the region. Among the most venerated figures in this tradition is Pîr Shaliyar, a semi-legendary Sufi mystic who is believed to have lived around the 12th Century C.E. His legacy endures through oral narratives and some ritual practices, including an annual festival commemorating the anniversary of his marriage to the princess of Egypt (or Bokhara in some accounts), around February. The festivities in the region have some traces of pre-Islamic practices and rites in them.
This book presents the rich cultural and belief system profile of the Hewraman region, drawing on oral accounts of the region’s recent history, hagiographies, narratives concerning the greatness of Sufis and their miraculous powers, recollections of traditional life, and autobiographies.
The book is structured as follows. In this chapter, (§1.2) introduces Hewramî and its speakers and (§1.3) outlines an overview of Hewramî grammar. Both of these sections are kept brief. Readers are encouraged to consult my detailed grammar of Hewramî (Mohammadirad 2025b) for a more comprehensive account. §1.4 discusses the provenance of the texts, including ethics and edditing decisions. §1.5 summarises the orthographic, glossing, and translation conventions in the book. §1.6 gives a brief overview of the genres and narrative styles, while §1.7, and §1.8 briefly introduce the narrators, and the text corpus, respectively. The main body of the book focuses on Part II, where texts 1–15 are presented in the following format: each text is preceded by a brief introduction and a summary of its content, followed by the text presented in parallel columns (Hewramî/English) and fully glossed in a separate section.
1.2 The language and its speakers
Hewramî is an Iranian language spoken in the remote mountainous region at the heart of the Kurdish-speaking region along the western border of Iran and neighbouring areas in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hewramî is a member of the Gorani subbranch of the Iranic languages (Indo-European: Iranic: Central Iranic: Northwestern Iranic: (Adharic:) Gorani: Hewramî).
The speakers refer to their language as Hewramî, a term used by neighbouring Kurdish speakers to refer to the Hewramî vernacular. In addition, Hewramîspeaking people generally refer to themselves as Kurds in a more socio-cultural and sense of the term “Kurd”, a sense which Kurds also employ to characterise Hewramîs and Kurds alike (See also Hassanpour 1992: 25).
The Hewramî-speaking population are concentrated in four regions within Hewraman (MacKenzie 1987): Luhon (in the south), Tekht (in the centre), Dizlî (in the north), and Razaw (around Sarv Abad). In Mahmoudveysi & Bailey (2018), the Razaw region is further divided into the Jawero and Gawero sub-regions. Figure 1.1 shows the region of Hewraman according to the mentioned divisions. Each point on the polygons indicates a locality. These geographical divisions do not necessarily correspond to linguistic subdivisions.
Hewramî varieties are traditionally divided into three major groupings: Tekht, Luhon, and Jawero. Geographically speaking, these varieties are spoken in the centre, south, and east of the greater Hewraman region, respectively. The Tekht region is linked to Jawero through a stretch of valleys, while the Luhon region is located in the western valley.
Within Iran, the most significant concentration of Hewramî speakers is in the cities of Marivan, Paveh, and Sarvabad. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Hewramî speakers can be found in cities such as Khurmal and Halabja. There are also Hewramîspeaking communities in major towns in the region, including Kermanshah and Sanandaj. In fact, Hewramî and, more generally, Goranî were once spoken over a larger territory. Over time, Goranî gave way to Kurdish (Leezenberg 1993). This linguistic shift has left its trace not only on the Kurdish vernaculars in the region, e.g. the Kurdish vernacular spoken in Sanandaj and the surrounding areas (Mohammadirad 2024a, b), but also on the neighbouring Neo-Aramaic dialects (Khan & Mohammadirad 2024a, b).
The material for this book was gathered in Hewraman Tekht, marked as an asterisk on Figure 1.1. Hewraman Tekht (Orāmān-e Takht) is the administrative centre of the Tekht region. It has a population of 5,000 people. The inhabitants of Hewraman Tekht are all Hewramî-speaking. Men are generally bilingual in Central Kurdish. Women over the age of 40 are usually monolingual in Hewramî…
Masoud Mohammadirad
Echoes of the past: Hewramî narratives
Language science press
Language science press Open Text Collections 4 Echoes of the past: Hewramî narratives Masoud Mohammadirad
Open Text Collections Chief Editor: Christian Döhler Editors: Rogier Blokland, Matt Coler, Nick Emlen, Diana Forker, Jeff Good, Karolina Grzech, Andreas Hölzl, Carolyn O’Meara, Michael Rießler, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Kilu von Prince
In this series: 1. Döhler, Christian. Speaking the map: Komnzo texts. 2. Zahrer, Alexander. Children of the sago: Muyu texts. 3. Vogel, Alan. The Stories of Siko and Yowao: Jarawara texts. 4. Mohammadirad, Masoud. Echoes of the past: Hewramî narratives.
ISSN (print): ISSN (electronic):
Masoud Mohammadirad. 2025. Echoes of the past: Hewramî narratives (Open Text Collections 4). Berlin: Language Science Press.
ISSN (print): ISSN (electronic): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17140764 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/531 Errata: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=531
Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Masoud Mohammadirad, Christian Döhler Proofreading: Matthew Korte Fonts: Libertinus, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software: XƎLATEX
Language Science Press Scharnweberstraße 10 10247 Berlin, Germany http://langsci-press.org support@langsci-press.org
Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Freie Universitat Berlin
