Gender in Hawrāmī

Gorani is one of the Northwestern Iranian languages spoken in Kermanshah and Kurdistan provinces of Iran, as well as a part of Iraqi Kurdistan. This language is highly endangered due to the heavy influence of its neighboring commonly spoken languages such as Persian, Arabic, and Kurdish. Gorani has maintained some very interesting grammatical features of the Middle Iranian languages, including gender, to which scholars like Mackenzie (1966) and Sajjadi (2014) have briefly made references. With respect to the notably effective role of gender in Gorani morphology and syntax, this essay sets out to address its uses and different forms by the field data of Hawrāmī Lahun and Hawrāmān Takht dialects. Considering the Corbett’s framework of gender (1991), methods for identifying the gender of loanwords and compound words are suggested. The results indicate significant differences in the grammatical gender of borrowed words from other languages, in the use of masculine and feminine case markers, and in the use of personal endings. Moreover, the findings show how the gender of nouns can influence some modifiers, such as the nominal dependent, in the above mentioned dialects