A note on the contact between Kurmanji Kurdish and Turkish at lexical and morphological level

Abstract

Turkish-Kurdish social setting where the Turkish and Kurdish languages are in contact for a long time induces borrowing and change at different levels.This study explores the contact between Kurmanji Kurdish and Turkish that take place at both morphological and lexical level. The data consist of three hours of recordings of family talks on the phone. Corpus analysis of data obtained from audio and video recordings of a family talk on the phone was done. Preliminary findings revealed that verbs are borrowed from Turkish and then integrated into Kurdish. The changes that Turkish borrowed verbs undergo include the integration process of morphological elements and the combination of verbs with light verbs (kirin, bûn) in Kurdish. The change that takes place in the integration process can be explained by interference and long-lasting contact between the two languages. The results are in line with the findings reported by Dorleijn and Bulut who suggested that the influence is mostly unidirectional, which in turn suggests that external language change results in borrowing of some particles and grammatical chunks from Turkish.

Keywords

Language contact lexical borrowing integration family talk Turkish Kurdish

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