Linguistic Features of the Kurmanji Dialect Among Turkish Yazidis

This encyclopedia entry provides a scholarly overview of the linguistic characteristics of the Kurmanji dialect as it is spoken by Yazidi communities in Turkey. It synthesizes recent field studies, dialect classifications, and script analyses to offer a comprehensive reference for researchers.

Kurmanji (Kurdish: Kurmancî) – the Northern Kurdish dialect spoken by Turkish Yazidis is a variety of Northern Kurdish that retains the core Indo‑Iranian grammar of the language family while incorporating a specialized religious lexicon and loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.

Pronunciation & orthography

In the Yazidi community the dialect is usually rendered in a Latin‑based alphabet devised in the 1990s, but older manuscripts employ an adapted Arabic script (often called the “Yazidi script”) and, for diaspora scholars, a Cyrillic transliteration exists. The IPA transcription of the prototypical word “kurd” (Kurdish) is /kuɾd/. Common English misspellings include “Kurmani,” “Kurmanci,” and “Kormanji.” Kurmancî is the standard Kurdish spelling; the Yazidi‑specific form Kirmaşanî appears in liturgical texts.

Main exposition

Phonology

Yazidi Kurmanji preserves the seven‑vowel system of Northern Kurdish (/i e ɛ a ɔ o u/) and the full set of stop series /p b t d k ɡ/. Notable are the retention of the uvular /q/ in Arabic loanwords (e.g., qewl “song”) and the devoicing of intervocalic /b/ to /p/ in colloquial speech, a feature documented in eastern Anatolian dialect surveys (Ergin Öpengin & Geoffrey Haig 2015) ¹. Palatalization before front vowels yields /c/ and /ɟ/, distinguishing Yazidi speech from neighboring Turkish‑influenced varieties that often merge these sounds.

Morphology

The dialect follows the agglutinative pattern typical of Kurdish: case suffixes (‑ê for absolutive, ‑ê for oblique) and plural markers (‑an, ‑ên). Yazidi religious terminology adds a set of possessive enclitics that encode reverence, such as the honorific suffix ‑ê Xwedê “of God” attached to divine names. Verb conjugation mirrors the standard Kurmanji paradigm, but the auxiliary be (to be) is frequently omitted in liturgical verses, creating a verbless nominal style reminiscent of classical Kurdish poetry (Haig 2018) ².

Lexicon

Yazidi Kurmanji incorporates a specialized corpus of religious vocabulary derived from ancient Mesopotamian, Persian, and Arabic sources. Words such as şêşê “seven” (referring to the Seven Angels) and temam “complete” appear only in Yazidi contexts. Moreover, everyday speech shows a high density of Turkish loanwords (e.g., ev “house” from Turkish ev) and Arabic religious terms (mala “wealth”) that have been phonologically adapted to Kurdish phonotactics (Öpengin & Haig 2014) ³.

Syntax

Word order remains predominantly Subject‑Object‑Verb (SOV), but poetic registers allow topicalization and fronting of verb phrases for rhythmic purposes. The use of the ezāfe construction (‑ê) to link nouns and adjectives is robust, mirroring patterns found across Kurmanji dialects (Haig & Öpengin 2018) ⁴. In religious recitations, the ezāfe often precedes divine epithets, creating a formulaic structure: Melekê Tawusî ê Xwedê “the Tawusî Angel of God.”

In the oral tradition

Yazidi oral literature—qewls (sacred hymns) and beyts (short verses)—preserves the dialect’s archaic features. The qewl “Şehîdê Melekê Baba” demonstrates the use of the historic past tense çû “went” instead of the modern çûye, a relic of early Kurdish. A typical line reads:

“Mê Şêx ê Baba çû ser çiyayê Şengalê” – “Our Sheikh Baba went to the mountain of Şengal.”

Field recordings confirm that the melodic contour of these verses reinforces the dialect’s vowel harmony while the accompanying instrumental patterns echo Kurdish folk music (Yazidi language and script, Academia.edu) ⁵.

Scholarly disagreement

Ergin Öpengin argues that Yazidi Kurmanji constitutes a sub‑dialect within the “Northern Kurdish (Turkey) – Central” cluster, emphasizing its unique religious lexicon as a defining criterion. Geoffrey Haig contends that the dialect should be treated as a sociolinguistic variety rather than a separate sub‑dialect, pointing to its high mutual intelligibility with neighboring Muslim Kurmanji speakers. Ali Açıkyıldız reads the Arabic‑derived religious terms as evidence of a historical “Yazidi‑Arabic lingua franca” that predates Ottoman‑era Turkish influence, a position contested by Haig’s phonological analysis, which locates most Arabic borrowings in the 19th‑century contact period (Haig 2018) ².

Common misconceptions

Regional variation

Within Turkey, Yazidi Kurmanji spoken in the Şanlıurfa‑Mardin border region displays stronger Turkish influence, whereas communities in the Sinjar‑Sheikhan area retain more Arabic lexical items. Syrian Yazidi enclaves exhibit vowel raising (/e/ → /i/) absent in Turkish speech. Diaspora communities in Germany and Sweden show a shift toward the Latin script and occasional English loanwords, yet maintain the core phonology through community schools.

Timeline

Data table