Magin_Edward-thesis

4. A grammatical sketch of Northern Kurdish
4.1 Introduction
Kurdish is traditionally divided into three groups: Northern, Central and Southern
Kurdish. These languages are in the Western Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of
the Indo-European family of languages (Sweetnam 2005:xix). Northern Kurdish is
spoken in Eastern Turkey, Northern Syria, Northern Iraq and Northwestern Iran (Allison
2001:6). There is also a large area of speakers in Northeastern Iran. Pockets of speakers
exist in nearby countries, such as Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in large cities of western
Turkey, such as Istanbul and Ankara. Kurdish emigrants who speak Northern Kurdish
can also be found in many more distant countries, such as Germany, Sweden, the
Netherlands, the UK, Russia, the USA and Australia.
The grammar herein presented is not meant to be exhaustive but is detailed
enough to give the reader a basic understanding of the language in the corpus. While I
have utilized the works of MacKenzie, Sirîn, Thackston, Zaxoyî, Sweetnam, and Chyet, I
have also drawn from my own experience of living in the Badinan area of northern Iraq.
Additionally, my personal communication with Nicholas and Denise Bailey, as well as
Shivan Tovi and Perwer Shushi―native speakers of the language― has been invaluable.
Northern Kurdish in northern Iraq is often referred to as Bahdini, or by the area of its
speakers, Badinan.
4.2 Orthography and phonetics
Northern Kurdish is written with Latin, Arabic and Cyrillic alphabets, depending
on the location of the speakers (Thackston 2006:viii). The more widely accepted Latin
orthography is the one that was used by the Badir Khan brothers in the 1930s, which has
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