Loanwords and Their Variations in Kurdish

Abstract

Loanwords are the words that are borrowed from other languagesto be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguisticsystem. Using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differsfrom one language or dialect to another. The current study comparesthe usage of loanwords in the written texts of two dialects of Kurdish,namely, Northern Kurmanji dialect (NK) and Middle Kurmanji dialect(MK) to identify which dialect uses loanwords more frequently. ìAvroîand ìKhabatî, the two local dailies, are used representing NK andMK respectively. The content of some of their articles are analysedaccording to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, artsand sport and the loanwords of each topic are categorized accordingto the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech.The results reveal that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequ-ently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variationaccording to factors such as the topic and donor language while nodifferences have been noted according to the part of speech. Thus,the current study reveals that adopting and using loanwords aresignificantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic,linguistic category and donor language.