The Effect of Age and Level of Education as Extra-Linguistics Variables on Mutual Intelligibility between Central and Southern Kurdish Dialects

This descriptive-analytic writing reports the effects of some extra-linguistics factors like age and education on mutual intelligibility between two Kurdish (central and southern) dialects in two varieties of these dialects called Badrei from Ilam province and Mahabadi from West Azarbayjan. We present our conclusions based on the research data gathered by Karimi-doostan and Mirmokri (1398). However, we investigate the effects of mentioned variables on intelligibility. To this purpose, we concentrated on the responses to the questionnaire presented in the previous research by adopting a different approach. We discuss the role of social variables determining the level of mutual intelligibility in questioned varieties. The findings of the previous study had showed that the intelligibility between Badrei and Mahabadi speakers was asymmetric and Mahabadi speakers’ performance was better in function tests. The findings had also showed that language attitudes had no effect on intelligibility of studied varieties and lack of language contact between them, and presence of phonological and lexical distances were recognized as the most important factors in that research. In the present paper, by dealing with the same data in more details, the findings suggested that social factors such as age and the level of education also influence intelligibility. Accordingly, it was found that the speakers with higher level of education obtained higher scores in function tests consisted word translation task (WTT), sentence translation task (STT), proverbs understanding, and retelling text tasks (RTT).