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This is a descriptive grammar of Zazaki, also called Kirmancca or
Kirmanckî. Zazaki is one of the four dialects of Kurdish. Its motherland is
the upper Mesopotamian region, and it is spoken in Eastern Anatolia of
Modern Turkey. Zaza diaspora lives mainly in Germany.
There are few reference grammars of any dialect of Kurdish published in
English and none on Zazaki. Consequently, this book will be a unique
resource as a reference grammar for the wider linguistics community. This
book covers the basic phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic
structure of Zazaki, and includes some sample texts.
The first chapter focuses on the phonetic inventory of Zazaki Kurdish; the
second chapter describes the morphological structure: parts of speech and
the relevant inflectional morphology. The third chapter presents the Zazaki
sentence structure, both simple and complex, including subordinate clauses.
Chapter four contains some sample texts, and finally, chapter five lists
most commonly used verbs in Zazaki.
This grammar relies heavily on both the very few published material on
Zazaki, particularly those of Vate Publications and data elicited from
native speakers of Zazaki. It adheres to the conventions of the Roman-based
alphabet, and to IPA forms where relevant.
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