Mutual Intelligibility between Central & Southern Kurdish Dialects: A Case Study of Mahabadi & Badrei Varieties

The present writing is a report of an empirical study to measure the level of mutual intelligibility between Mahabadi variety from West Azarbayjan and Badrei one from Ilam Province based on linguistic and non-linguistic criteria and receptive multilingualism approach. For this purpose, two types of tests, that is, function tests and opinion tests were used. We used targeted sampling to exclude subjects who had previous language contact. Test materials which were translated into the most common language in both varieties, were recorded. Subjects wrote the meaning or translation of presented auditory items in Persian. Findings showed that intelligibility between two varieties was not symmetric and although the attitude of Badrei speakers was more positive compared to the other variety, the scores of Mahabadi speakers in function tests were higher. This finding contradicts the result of the previous studies conducted by Maurud (1976) and Delsing and Akesson (2005) who claimed that there was a positive correlation between positive attitude and intelligibility. Moreover, the findings showed that among the eleven lexical features emphasized by Gooskens et al. (2008) as factors affecting intelligibility, phonetic distance and lexical etymology influence intelligibility more than other factors in these varieties.