Language

Second‑generation Yazidis in Europe sustain Kurdish (Kurmanji) proficiency through family transmission, community schools, religious practice, digital media and transnational networks. Their strategies reveal a dynamic balance between integration and cultural preservation.

This article surveys the Persian lexical items that have entered Yazidi religious language, tracing their historical routes, semantic domains, and the scholarly debates surrounding their significance. It highlights how these loanwords illuminate the cultural contacts between Yazidis and Persianate societies.

The spread of Yazidi communities beyond their historic homelands has introduced a range of loanwords into du‘a, the sacred prayer language. This article examines how diaspora contact with Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Western languages reshapes Yazidi devotional lexicon.

Yazidi prayer manuscripts exist in three primary scripts—Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic—each reflecting distinct historical, linguistic, and regional influences. This article compares their orthographic features, textual conventions, and the scholarly debates surrounding their use.

Qewlê Kirasgorîn is a sacred Yazidi hymn rendered in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish. Its linguistic profile showcases a rich oral‑poetic tradition marked by formulaic diction, distinctive metrical patterns, and layered semantic fields that encode theological concepts. This article surveys its phonology, morphology, syntax, and prosody, drawing on recent scholarly analyses of Yazidi Qewls.

Yazidi hymns, called qewl, are being safeguarded through field recordings, metadata standards, and collaborative digital repositories. Projects led by AMAM and partners use modern audio technology, cloud storage, and scholarly transcription to protect this oral heritage for future generations.

Several digital initiatives now preserve Yazidi sacred verses, including the Yazidi Community Archive, the Institute for Ezidi Sciences, and academic collaborations documenting Qewls and Beyts. Researchers can access these resources through open‑access portals, downloadable datasets, and institutional repositories.

Yazidi Kurmanji, the Kurdish dialect spoken by Yazidis in the Khabur Valley of Syria and in Armenia, shows distinct phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic traits. These differences stem from historical migration, contact with Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Armenian, and divergent religious vocabularies.

The article surveys how Yazidi liturgical terms shift in pronunciation, morphology, and semantics across Sinjar, neighboring Kurdish areas, and diaspora communities. It draws on fieldwork, manuscript studies, and oral‑tradition analyses to map these dialectal patterns.

Yazidi Kurmanji, the dialect used for Yazidi religious texts, faces unique Unicode encoding hurdles due to script diversity, non‑standard letters, and limited resources. Recent discussions on Kurdish Sorani and specialized Kurdish letters have shaped practical solutions for digital preservation.