This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in
selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The
contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on
Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the
Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on
additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon,
phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect
categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special
reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex
clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic
questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in
lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech
recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking
regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects
of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some
consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to
students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic
typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and
dialectology.