Loanwords and Their Variations in Kurdish

Aveen Mohammed Hasan, PhD, Assistant Professor
English Language Department, Faculty of Humanities
University of Zakho, Kurdistan Region-Iraq
e-mail: aveen.hasan@uoz.edu.krd
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9974-9665

ABSTRACT

Loanwords are the words that are borrowed from other languages to be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguistic system. Using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differs from one language or dialect to another. The current study compares the usage of loanwords in the written texts of two dialects of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji dialect (NK) and Middle Kurmanji dialect (MK) to identify which dialect uses loanwords more frequently. “Avro” and “Khabat”, the two local dailies, are used representing NK and MK respectively. The content of some of their articles are analysed according to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, arts and sport and the loanwords of each topic are categorized according to the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech. The results reveal that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variation according to factors such as the topic and donor language while no differences have been noted according to the part of speech. Thus, the current study reveals that adopting and using loanwords are significantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic, linguistic category and donor language.

Keywords: loanwords, Kurdish, NK dialect, MK dialect, linguistic variations

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How to cite:
Hasan, A. M. (2021). “Loanwords and Their Variations in Kurdish.” Journal of Comparative Studies 14 (43), 10–27. https://doi.org/10.59893/jcs.14(43).002