The Persistence of Archaic Features in Bazayni-Kurdisch

Bazayni Kurdish is a language that is spoken today mainly in the central Anatolian district of Haymana. Although the term Kurdish appears in the name of the language and some of its speakers refer to themselves as Kurdish, its exact linguistic affiliation is still unclear. Apart from Haymana, Bazayni Kurdish is spoken on the Black Sea coast, in eastern Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Speakers also live in Turkey`s major cities and in the European diaspora. Bazayni Kurdish is an endangered language: even in its main area of settlement, Haymana, it is now mainly spoken by the parent and grandparent generation. Furthermore, apart from references by outsiders, e.g., in travel reports by European travellers, in Ottoman archives, or by medieval historians, there are no material sources such as written records or buildings relating to the history of the speakers. The aim of this project is to create a complete documentation corpus of the Bazayni Kurdish spoken in Haymana. We are focusing on the subdialects of Kosewdeli and Turin, which differ in terms of phonology and morphology. This documentation forms the database on the basis of which the affiliation of Bazayni Kurdish is to be clarified. To this end, the common and different features of Kurdish are systematically documented and described. In this way, our data and our research on Bazayni Kurdish will bring new perspectives to the question of the Kurdish language family and closely related but independent languages. The data will also enable us to describe contact phenomena between Bazayni Kurdish and its current and historical contact languages. Archaic linguistic features that Bazayni Kurdish has preserved play a special role in the study. Both the Kurdish language and dialect group and Bazayni Kurdish belong to the larger Iranian language family. An example of archaisms is the Old Iranian *w- in initial position. This has evolved into b- in Kurdish. In Bazayni Kurdish, however, *w- has been preserved. At the morphological level, there are also features that are only found in Bazayni Kurdish (such as a special perfect form of the 3rd person singular). Bazayni Kurdish shares other features (such as the passive voice) with Northern Kurdish. We will systematically document, describe and compare these archaic forms for the first time: with Kurdish, Gurani, Zazaki, Central Iranian Plateau dialects and the Fars dialect. This data-based comparison of archaic features and (shared) innovations will open up new perspectives on the historical development of Kurdish. In addition, this study is exemplary for the reconstruction of historical details (such as migration routes) of communities that have left behind few material sources. Their history has therefore been handed down primarily in their language.