پژوهشنامه ادبیات کردی (Sep 2019)
A short look at some of the linguistic properties of Hewramî Kirmaşanî
Abstract
Languages of the world undergo different types of gradual changes due to various reasons and may even transform into entirely new varieties with totally new features in their phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems. Hawrami, as a New Iranian language and one of the sub branches of Gurani languages, is no exception to this general pattern. So far, different varieties of this language have been identified and partially described in the available literature on Iranian Linguistics and Iranian Studies. The present paper seeks to introduce a new variety of Hawrami, referred to as "Hawrami Kermashani", and shed light on some of its defining characteristics. The ancestors of the speakers of this special variety of Hawrami, who generally live in Kermanshah now, have migrated from Paveh since 1920s under social, economic, and political circumstances. Since the attested linguistic changes occurred in the idiolects of the second and third generations of these immigrants follow a fixed pattern, their variety can now be plausibly identified as a new geographical dialect of Hawrami. Some of the prominent features of this new variety, which are presented here in the form of a comparison with the same features in the relatively-more-studied variety of Paveh, are: omission of a special allophone which is traditionally described as "dal Hawrami", omission of gender distinction, change in the expression of plurality, radical changes in the linguistic expression of progressive aspect, changes in the patterns of case marking, and changes in the codification of ergative alignment.
