Stress and its Functions in the Hawrami Language

This paper aims to study the place of stress in word classes and its functions in the Hawrami language, one of the new Northwestern Iranian languages. I have interviewed ten illiterate native speakers of this language aged between 30 and 80, and have collected the data in a recording of about five hours. Furthermore, written materials within this domain and my linguistic intuition as a native speaker are used as sources of research literature. Data analysis indicates that stress is distinctive in this language and has three functions: 1. It changes the meaning of the word. 2. It changes the grammatical category of the word. 3. It is the distinguishing factor of grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives having the same formal markers. The grammatical gender in the masculine and feminine nouns ending in the vowels [a] and [i] and masculine and feminine adjectives ending in the vowel [a] is identified by the place of stress.