The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish

The Mukri Variety of Central Kurdish

Ergin Öpengin

Ludwig Reichert

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 ...