Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/56078
Title: Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
Contributor(s): Ozek, Fatih (author); Saglam, Bilgit (author); Gooskens, Charlotte  (author)
Publication Date: 2023
Early Online Version: 2021-12-01
Open Access: Yes
DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2020-0151
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/56078
Abstract: 

We present the first results of a large project concerned with the mutual intelligibility between Zazaki and Kurmanji dialects spoken in Eastern Anatolia. There is an ongoing debate on the classification of Kurmanji and Zazaki as separate languages or as dialects of the same language, Kurdish. However, there is no scientific study of how well speakers of Zazaki and other dialects of Kurdish can understand each other. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot investigation where we tested the mutual intelligibility of 69 Kurmanji and Zazaki participants by means of a word translation task and asked the participants to estimate how well they could understand the other language variety. The results showed that overall the mutual intelligibility was rather low. There was a significant interaction between the effects of gender and language. Zazaki males identified more words correctly than Kurmanji males while Kurmanji females had higher intelligibility scores than Zazaki females. We suggest linguistic (lexical) and non-linguistic (attitudes and amount of exposure) explanations for the intelligibility results. We also have a closer look at the intelligibility of individual words to gain a greater understanding of the reasons for the asymmetric intelligibility results.

Publication Type: Journal Article
Source of Publication: Applied Linguistics Review, 14(5), p. 1411-1449
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Place of Publication: Germany
ISSN: 1868-6311
1868-6303
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 470401 Applied linguistics and educational linguistics
470407 Language documentation and description
470319 Other European languages
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 130202 Languages and linguistics
130201 Communication across languages and culture
Peer Reviewed: Yes
HERDC Category Description: C1 Refereed Article in a Scholarly Journal
Appears in Collections:Journal Article
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Files in This Item:
3 files
File Description SizeFormat 
openpublished/MutualGooskens2023JournalArticle.pdfPublished version2.8 MBAdobe PDF
Download Adobe
View/Open
Show full item record

SCOPUSTM   
Citations

1
checked on Aug 10, 2024

Page view(s)

700
checked on Aug 11, 2024

Download(s)

52
checked on Aug 11, 2024
Google Media

Google ScholarTM

Check

Altmetric


This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons