Kordestan Province in the Atlas of the Languages of Iran: Research process, language distribution, and language.
Jaffer Sheyholislami.
Jurnal: Current Issues in Kurdish linguistics, 2019.
Kordestan is one of four provinces in Iran where Kurdish is the main spoken language. A small number of studies of specific language varieties in Kordestan Province have appeared, and the province is featured as part of several general regional or country-wide maps of language distribution. Until now, however, no systematic study on the language situation in this province has been published. The present paper, which seeks to address this gap, provides an account of the research currently being carried out on Kordestan Province of Iran in the context of the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) research programme. After introducing the Atlas project and the research team for Kordestan, we look at the role of existing data sources in the Atlas, including the production of a background map and an online bibliography of language-related resources. The main portion of the paper deals with the collection of new data, consisting of local place names and language distribution data, combined with existing data sets and mapped out to the level of each settlement. The results of our study show that the language situation in Kordestan Province is more diverse than often assumed, with six important high-level varieties represented: Central Kurdish, Southern Kurdish, Hawrami, Turkic, Persian and Aramaic. Most of these varieties also show significant internal variation, as shown by our inventory and initial classification of all major subvarieties. The study concludes with reflections on the importance of a fine-grained and systematic approach to investigating the language situation, the limitations of this type of large-scale study, and possibilities for further research that refines and builds on the findings presented here. [1]
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