Judeo-Gūrānī: Exploring Linguistic and Cultural Interactions between Jews and Non-Jews in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Iran

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Saloumeh Gholami
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 529595841

Judeo-Gûrânî, which is entirely absent from the study of Gûrânî literature, is an increasingly important area in investigating social, intellectual, and linguistic interactions between Jews and Non-Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran. It is worth knowing what factors led to the Jews of Kermanshah engaging with Gûrânî literature, a non-Jewish literary tradition, and how did this cultural exchange reflect the dynamics of interethnic relations in the region. A further important aspect is to understand, in what social context they received and recorded this non-Jewish literary tradition and what was the role of Jewish scholars, patrons, and institutions in the reception, transmission, and preservation of Gûrânî literature in Kermanshah. Judeo-Gûrânî texts offer a variety of unique features due contact of different languages such as Persian, South Kurdish, Gûrânî and Hawrami, and are thus of particular importance for the study of code switching, language convergence, borrowing, pidgins, and related topics. The overarching objective of the present project is: 1) To discuss, test and update the concept of Gūrānī in the context of the Judeo- Gûrânî tradition; 2) to reconstruct the linguistic profile of the texts using synchronic and diachronic approaches; and 3) to study the extent to which Judeo- Gûrânî differs from co-territorial Literary Gûrânî and other living, spoken varieties. In order to answer these questions, as well as to provide an effective cross-linguistic study, the proposed project will address a series of unresolved and complex issues in the typology of Literary Gûrânî by using Gûrânî texts that were written by the Jews of Kermanshah and Saqqez, and by comparing them to similar texts that were written by Muslims in Persian script and to spoken Gûrânî varieties. For our analysis, we will employ a roughly 600-page corpus of five Judeo- Gûrânî manuscripts and 500 pages of similar Gûrânî texts in Persian script. Considering four main theories regarding the linguistic profile of Literary Gûrânî: 1) Gûrânî is a Koiné (MacKenzie 2002), 2) Gûrânî is a Continuum (Kreyenbroek & Chaman Ara 2013), 3) Gûrânî texts are written forms of Hawrami (Moftizadeh 2017), 4) Gûrânî is a high variety and Hawrami a low variety in a diglossic situation (Karami and Gholami forthcoming), the project aims to answer the following linguistic research questions: 1) What degree of convergence does the language of different Gûrânî varieties show in their grammar? 2) What are linguistic differences between Literary Gûrânî, spoken Gûrânî and Hawrami verities? 3) To what extent does language contact play a role in shaping the linguistic profile of Judeo- Gûrânî texts?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants