Verbal borrowing in Persian, Kurdish, and Azarbaijani

This paper investigates the loan verb accommodation strategies applied in the recipient languages of Persian، Kurdish (Sine''i dialect) and Azabaijani، spoken in the geographical area of Iran. The present study builds upon the work by Wohlgemuth (2009) who presents a typology for verbal borrowings. Based on the data taken from one monolingual and two bilingual dictionaries، major loan verb accommodation strategies in the three languages are isolated، described and exemplified. In this connection، it is demonstrated that Persian makes use of three major accommodation strategies of light verb، semantic borrowing، and indirect insertion، while in Kurdish direct insertion and semantic borrowing are applied، in spite of the fact that the latter language is an Iranian language، just like Persian. The reason behind this difference can be ascribed to the donor languages from which these two languages borrow. Most of the lexical items borrowed into Kurdish، have their origin in Persian. Being in the same language family، Persian and Kurdish share many linguistic features; therefore، applying the direct insertion strategy in accommodating verbal loans from Persian is fully justified in Kurdish. This is in contrast to Azarbaijani which makes no use of direct insertion strategy in borrowing verbal items from Persian، in spite of the fact that it has almost the same sociolinguistic standing like Kurdish in Iran. Being from a different language family، Azabaijani applies semantic borrowing and indirect insertion strategies to accommodate loan-verbs from Persian.