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Attitudes toward Kurdish in the City of Ilam in Iran

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The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad

Abstract

This study investigated the attitudes of Kurdish native speakers in the city of Ilam toward their mother tongue. The social status and vitality of Kurdish language along with the institutional support provided by the government for this language were investigated. The data collection tools included questionnaire, interview and ethnographic fieldwork. The participants for the questionnaire phase were 360 male and female Kurdish native speakers aged between 18 and 30 and from different educational backgrounds. The participants in the interview were 22 from the survey phase. The results revealed that Kurds in Ilam had a positive attitude toward their language and Kurdish enjoyed a respectable degree of vitality. The results also provided mixed findings for the status of Kurdish and the institutional support it received.

An early draft of this paper was presented in the Third International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics (25–26 August 2016), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All these extracts were originally produced in Kurdish and Persian; they were later translated into English.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mohsen Amini and Dr. Zakarya Bezdoode for offering the Kurdish poem and helping us with its most appropriate translation in English.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Saeed Rezaei & Ava Bahrami

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  1. Saeed Rezaei
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  2. Ava Bahrami
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Correspondence to Saeed Rezaei .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Rezaei, S., Bahrami, A. (2019). Attitudes toward Kurdish in the City of Ilam in Iran. In: Mirvahedi, S. (eds) The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19605-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19605-9_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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