Loanwords are those words that are taken from other languages to be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguistic system. However, using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differs from one language or dialect to another. The current study compares the 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 than the other. Avro and Khabat, the two local dailies, are used representing NK and MK respectively. In addition, the content of some of their articles are analysed according to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, arts and sport. Moreover, loanwords of each topic are categorized according to the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech. The results show that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variation according to factors such as the topic and donor language while no differences are realised according to the part of speech. Thus, the current study reveals how adopting and using loanwords is significantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic, linguistic category and donor language.

Intonation phrase is one of the prosodic units in the prosodic structure hierarchy and it is the domain of intonational patterns. Although the importance of intonation phrase has been acknowledged by Kurdish intonational studies, there are no detailed and systematic analyses of this prosodic unit and its structure. This study is an attempt to systematically investigate the intonation phrase, its structure and the criteria used for its identification in one of the most widely spoken varieties of Kurdish, namely Northern Kurmanji dialect. The study is mainly centred on recordings of read speech which consists of experimentally sentences and a short story. The data is produced by 30 Kurdish native speakers who are undergraduate and staff at University of Duhok. The recordings were carried out at the University of Duhok using PRAAT. The data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the ToBI system. The intonation phrase is identified as a prosodic unit in the Kurdish prosodic structure hierarchy. Different parameters are identified for intonational phrasing in Kurdish as in other languages: phonetic cues (such as pause and pre-boundary lengthening), phonological parameters and syntactic-prosodic criteria. The study is a first attempt to systematically investigate the intonation phrase in Kurdish. It contributes to fill a gap in the Kurdish phonological studies. Besides, the study is a step in enriching the typological studies of intonation by adding another language to the ones already investigated, and to pave the way to a more refined theory of intonation by comparing and contrasting a greater number of languages.

Languages vary in terms of whether they are stress or non-stress accent languages. Concerning whether Northern Kurdish is a stress or non-stress accent language, there is no experimental investigation which has ever examined the phonetic correlates of word-level prominence. This study aims to establish the acoustic correlates of word-level prominence in Northern Kurdish. It is based on the production of pairs of segmentally parallel syllables occurring in stressed vs. unstressed positions. The materials are produced by 30 native speakers. Measurements of f0, duration and intensity of the test syllables in each token were extracted. The hypothesis is that if Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language, the values of all the variables will be higher in the stressed condition than in the unstressed condition, whereas if it is a non-stress-accent language, only f0 values are predicted to be higher in the stressed condition. The results indicate that Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language in that it employs both tonal and non-tonal correlates, especially duration, cues to word-level prominence. Additionally, stress influences the durations of the segmental material of the stressed syllables, i.e. consonants and vowels.

One of the strategies that are used to avoid vowel sequences is glide insertion (GI) (Zygiz, 2009; Uffman,2007). GI has not been studied properly in the previous works in Kurdish phonology which involve only an intuitive description of this process in one dialect (for example, Thackston, 2006 and Hasan, 2012 for NK Kurdish). No studies have described GI across a number of dialects to observe whether there are any dialectal variations. Additionally, the effects of segmental context on GI have not been investigated yet. This study provides an analysis of GI in word-medial vowel clusters at root-suffix boundary in Kurdish and it is the first attempt to analyse the effects of dialect and segmental context on GI. It describes this phonological process across four different sub-dialects and across different segmental contexts.

The importance of intonation has been unanimously agreed-upon among Kurdish linguists (Majid, 1987; Hasan, 2005; Mosa, 2009). However, there is no detailed description of Kurdish tonal events and their interaction with other prosodic and segmental features. This study is a first attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the tonal events of one of the most widely spoken varieties of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji (NK) within the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology (AM). The present investigation which is part of a larger study is based on recordings of read speech which consists of experimentally designed sentences and a short story. The data is produced by 30 NK native speakers, undergraduate and staff at the University of Duhok. The data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the ToBI system (Beckman and Hirschberg, 1994; Beckman and Elam, 1997; Beckman, et al, 2005) to prepare the material for paradigmatic and syntagmatic comparisons of prominence marking and demarcation of boundary tones. We identified four bitonal pitch accents associated with the prominent syllables in NK, i.e. H*L, HL*, L*H and LH*. The pitch accents may be right-headed or left-headed. The starred tones are invariably timed to be associated with the accented syllable, whereas the unstarred tones are variable in their association and alignment, i.e. they may be associated with the accented syllable, in the following syllable(s), in the preceding syllable(s) (in the case of HL* and LH*) or they may be delayed to be aligned with the end of the intonation phrase (IP). All of these tonal events were found in nuclear position but only one type, namely L*H appears in the prenuclear position. Moreover, the pitch accents in NK are not specific to the accented lexical item and can never contrast different lexical items, but can contrast different intonational meanings. Additionally, it is shown that NK Kurdish is a stress-accent language in which both tonal and non-tonal features, especially duration, are used to indicate prominence. Furthermore, NK has a limited pitch accent distribution, i.e. pitch accents do not occur on every phonological word (PW) in an IP because it is governed by information context, utterance-type and sometimes the speaker. In our study, we also identified four types of boundary tones: L%, H%, LH% and 0%. It is observed that the co-occurrences of the boundary tones depend on the type of the pitch accent, i.e. the falling pitch accents (H*L and HL*) only co-occur with either H% or 0%, the rising pitch accent L*H co-occur with L%, LH% or 0%, and the rising pitch accent LH* co-occur with either L% or LH% boundary tones. The study contributes to the debate of a number of unsolved issues in the AM approach, such as the existence or non-existence of phrase accents and the (co-) occurrence of trailing and leading tones in bitonal pitch accents. It supports the motivation of trailing tones and following a number of authors (e.g. Ladd, 1983 and Gussenhoven, 1984), it indicates that there is no motivation for positing a phrase accent, i.e. in H*L and L*H pitch accents the trailing L and H tones undergoes a tone spreading rule or the other possibility is that their association is delayed to the IP-final and there is no obvious phonetic basis for inserting a phrase accent. Furthermore, the study not only contributes to fill a gap in the Kurdish phonological studies, but also can be considered the first step towards developing NK-ToBI, a language specific intonational transcription tool that adapts the leading framework for annotation of intonation in the field. Besides, the study is a step in enriching the typological studies of intonation by adding another language to those that have already been investigated, and to pave the way to a more refined theory of intonation by comparing and contrasting a greater number of languages.

Intonation patterns vary systematically between utterance types (Grabe & Post, 2002, Grabe, et al, 2003, 2008 & Grabe 2004). Differences in the intonational make-up of utterances may also be the result of intra- and inter-speaker variation (Peppe, et al, 2000 and Grabe & Post, 2002). Cross-utterance and cross-speaker variation of intonation patterns has largely been ignored in studies of Kurdish intonation. A few descriptive analyses of intonation patterns in specific utterance types have been carried out (e.g. Majid, 1987 & Mosa, 2009) but no comparative investigation of cross-utterance variation has been conducted to identify language specific intonational characteristics in Kurdish. Similarly, cross-speaker variation has not been considered. Previous work has focused solely on the analysis of individual speakers in a specific contexts (e.g. Hasan, 2005 & Mosa, 2009) without reference to the prosodic production of other speakers in similar situations. The present paper is part of a larger study and investigates the intonational patterns across-speakers and across utterance types in a Kurdish variety spoken in Northern Kurmanji (NK), employing the autosegmental-metrical framework (Pierrehumbert, 1980). The study is based on a set of designed sentences of different syntactic types, namely statements, declarative questions, wh-questions, exclamations and imperatives. The experimental design of the sentences controlled for voiced/sonorant portions, word lengths and stress placement. The data were produced by 30 native speakers of NK, 15 male and 15 female. The recordings were carried out in the University of Duhok using PRAAT software and were made directly onto a Dell computer laptop using a Creative Headset HS-600 microphone. The data were analysed in two stages. Firstly, the data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the IViE (Grabe et al, 1998) including orthographic and phonetic transcription, demarcation of break index and prominent syllables, annotation of phonetic and phonological pitch targets. In the second stage, paradigmatic and syntagmatic comparisons were made within and across the different utterance types. The identification of specific prosodic cues allows for an investigation of phrasing, location of the primary prominence and the shape of the f0 contour, characteristics that have been shown to provide salient acoustic cues in the perception of speech (Grabe, Nolan & Farrer, 1998). The results show that both utterance type and speaker have an effect on intonation in Kurdish. First, there is less cross utterance and cross-speaker variation in phrasing in comparison to the other two aspects of intonation because most of the utterances are produced as one intonational phrase. Second, there is a considerable variation in the location of the primary prominence which seems to largely depend on sentence type, i.e. in statements, primary prominence is placed on the preverbal element, either on the verb or the preverbal element in declarative questions, in the question word in the wh-questions, in the exclamation marker in the exclamations and in the first syllable of the verb in the imperatives. Thirdly, there is variation in the shape of the f0 contour within and across utterance types: • More than one f0 pattern is realised for each utterance type, e.g. four for statements (rise-fall, rise-fall-level, falling & falling-level) two for declarative questions (rise-fall-rise & fall-rise), three for wh-questions (rise-fall, rise-fall-level, rise-fall-rise), two for exclamations (rise-fall & rise-fall-level) and four for imperatives (rise-fall, falling, rise-fall-level, falling-level). • There is an overlap between some utterance types, for instance, the contour rise-fall-level is realised in four of the utterance types examined (statements, wh-questions, exclamations and imperatives). • Some patterns are found more commonly in some utterance types but less in others, e.g. rise-fall-rise is more frequent in the declarative questions but less frequent in the wh-questions. • Finally, some other patterns are restricted to one utterance type, for example, the fall-rise is only realised in declarative questions. The findings not only provide a description of the NK intonational system in different sentence types, but also contributes to our knowledge of the organisation of intonational phonological systems. The understanding of regional variability in the systematic organisations of intonational patterns and other prosodic cues will allow for a deeper understanding of prosodic and intonational typology and phonology.