Gorani is spoken in Iraq and Iran and has four dialects: Bajelani, Hawrami, and Sarli, some sources also include the Shabaki as a dialect of Gorani as well.[3] Of these, Hawrami was the traditional literary language and koiné of Kurds in the historical Ardalan region at the Zagros Mountains,[12][13] but has since been supplanted by Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish.[14]
Gorani had an estimated 180,000 speakers in Iran in 2007 and 120,000 speakers in Iraq as well in 2007 for a total of 300,000 speakers. Ethnologue reports that the language is threatened in both countries and that speakers residing in Iraq includes all adults and some children, however it does not mention if speakers are shifting to Sorani or not. Many speakers of Gorani in Iran also speak Sorani, Persian, as well as Southern Kurdish. Most speakers in Iraq also speak Sorani, while some also speak Mesopotamian Arabic.[15]
Etymology
The name Goran appears to be of Indo-Iranian origin. The name may be derived from the old Avestan word, gairi, which means mountain.[16]
Under the independent rulers of Ardalan (9th–14th / 14th–19th century), with their capital latterly at Sanandaj, Gorani became the vehicle of a considerable corpus of poetry. Gorani was and remains the first language of the scriptures of the Ahl-e Haqq sect, or Yarsanism, centered on Gahvara. Prose works, in contrast, are hardly known. The structure of Gorani verse is very simple and monotonous. It consists almost entirely of stanzas of two rhyming half-verses of ten syllables each, with no regard to the quantity of syllables.
Names of forty classical poets writing in Gorani are known, but the details of the lives and dates are unknown for the most part. Perhaps the earliest writer is Mele Perîşan, author of a masnavi of 500 lines on the Shi'ite faith who is reported to have lived around 1356–1431. Other poets are known from the 17th–19th centuries and include Shaykh Mustafa Takhtayi, Khana Qubadi, Yusuf Yaska, Mistefa Bêsaranî and Khulam Rada Khan Arkawazi. One of the last great poets to complete a book of poems (divan) in Gurani is Mawlawi Tawagozi south of Halabja.
Kurdish Shahnameh is a collection of epic poems that has been passed down through speech from one generation to the next, that eventually some stories were written down by Almas Khan-e Kanoule'ei in the eighteenth century. There exist also a dozen or more long epic or romantic masnavis, mostly translated by anonymous writers from Persian literature including: Bijan and Manijeh, Khurshid-i Khawar, Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad, Haft Khwan-i Rostam and Sultan Jumjuma. Manuscripts of these works are currently preserved in the national libraries of Berlin, London, and Paris.
Example of Gorani poetry
Şîrîn û Xesrew written in 1740 by Khana Qubadî.
Herçen mewaçan: Fersî şekeren
Kurdî ce şeker bell şîrînteren
Yeqînen ce dewr dunyay pirr endêş
Herkes dillşaden we ziwan wêş
Although it's said that Persian is sweet as sugar,
But, for me Kurdish is sweeter than sugar
Clearly, in this perfidious world,
Everyone is happy with his own beautiful mother tongue.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2019)
Bajelani
Bajelani is a Gorani dialect[3] with about 59,000 speakers, predominately around Mosul,[18] near Khanaqin and near the Khosar valley.[6]
Hawrami
Hawrami (هەورامی; Hewramî) also known as Avromani, Awromani or Horami, is a Gorani dialect and is regarded as the most archaic one.[19] It is mostly spoken in the Hawraman region, a mountainous region located in western Iran (Iranian Kurdistan) and northeastern Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan). There are around 23,000 speakers, and it was classed as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO in 2010.[20]
Due to concerns with the decline of Hawrami speakers, as people move away from the Hawraman region to cities like Erbil, Jamal Habibullah Faraj Bedar, a retired teacher from Tawela, decided to translate the Qur'an from Arabic into Hawrami. The translation took two and a half months and 1000 copies of the publication were printed in Tehran.[20]
Sarli
Sarli is spoken in northern Iraq by a cluster of villages[21] north of the Little Zab river,[22] on the confluence of the Khazir River and the Great Zab river, just west-northwest of the city of Kirkuk.[23] It has fewer than 20,000 speakers.[24] Many speakers have been displaced by conflicts in the region.[25] It is reportedly most similar to Bajelani[25] but is also similar to Shabaki.[26] It contains Kurdish, Turkish and Persian influences, like its neighbours Bajelani and Shabaki.[27]
All voiceless plosives and affricates are aspirated.
A glottal stop [ʔ] may be heard before a word-initial vowel, but is not phonemic.
Sounds /ʕ ʁ/ only occur in loanwords.
/x/ can also be heard as [χ] among different dialects.
/q/ can also be aspirated as [qʰ].
The voiced /d/ may be lenited in post-vocal positions, and occur as a voiced dental approximant [ð̞]. In the Nawsud dialects, /d/ can be heard as an alveolar approximant sound [ɹ], and may also be devoiced when occurring in word-final positions as [ɹ̥].
In the Nawsud and Nodša dialects, a word-initial /w/ can be heard as a [v] or a labialized [vʷ].
/n/ when preceding velar consonants, is heard as a velar nasal [ŋ].
Sounds /æ ə/ both can be realized as an open-mid [ɛ].[28]
Hawrami Grammar
Nouns
Hawrami distinguishes between two genders and two cases; Masculine & Feminine, and Nominative & Oblique. The two cases are otherwise referred to as the Direct and Indirect Cases.
Gender distinctions in nouns are indicated by a combination of final stress and vowel/consonant ending. Masculine nouns in the nominative form are indicated by a stressed "-O", -Δ, "-U", "-E", "-A" and all consonant endings. Feminine nouns are indicated by an unstressed "-E", "-Î", a stressed "-Ê" and rarely, a stressed "-A".
There are 3 declensions. The declensions of each gender will be demonstrated as an example.
First Declension (Masculine Consonant Ending; Feminine Short Unstressed Vowel Ending)
Masculine : Kur (Boy)
Feminine : Xatune (Queen)
Second Declension (Masculine Stressed Short Vowel Ending; Feminine Stressed "-Ê” Ending)
Note: " ' " indicates syllable followed will be stressed
In Hawrami, definiteness and indefiniteness is marked by two independent suffixes, "-ew", and "-(a)ka".
These suffixes decline for case and gender. The indefinite suffix "-ew" is declined by the first declension pattern while the definite suffix
"-(a)ka" follows the second declension paradigm
^Ara, Behrooz Chaman (2015). Chaman Ara, Behrooz. The Kurdish Shahnama and its Literary and Religious Implications. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN978-1511523493.
^Mahmoudveysi, Parvin; Bailey, Denise (2018). Hawrāmī of western Iran. Geoffrey Haig and Geoffrey Khan (eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia: Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. pp. 533–568.
![Partial tree of Indo-European languages.[30]](/en/File:IndoEuropeanTree.svg)
