Date: 8-9th October 2014
Place: Department of Kurdish Language and Culture, Institute of Living Languages, Mardin Artuklu University, Mardin/Turkey
The last two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in interest for the Kurdish language, within both academia in the narrow sense and in the fields of educational policies, and in Kurdish arts and literatures. Although a number of important advances have been made in all these areas, within Kurdish linguistics, there remains a persistent lack of theoretically informed and empirically grounded research on actual language usage, and the various dimensions of variation within the Kurdish speech community: regional, age-based, gender-based, attitudinal, or socio-economically motivated. Likewise, there have been few serious attempts at relating synchronic variation to diachronic change.
This conference aims to bring together scholars working on different varieties of Kurdish and neighbouring languages who share an awareness and appreciation of variation as pivotal in the analysis of contemporary Kurdish and in reconstructing its historical development.
Kurdish Studies Network 