Gorani language

Gorani (Kurdish: گۆرانی, romanized: Goranî, lit. 'song'), also known by the name of its main dialect, Hawrami (ھەورامی, romanized: Hewramî), is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken by ethnic Kurds in northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran and which with Zaza constitute the Zaza–Gorani languages. Zaza and Gorani are linguistically distinct from the Kurdish language, although the great majority of their speakers consider their language to be Kurdish.

Gorani is spoken in Iraq and Iran and has four dialects: Bajelani, Hawrami, and Sarli, some sources also include the Shabaki as a dialect of Gorani as well. Of these, Hawrami was the traditional literary language and koiné of Kurds in the historical Ardalan region at the Zagros Mountains, but has since been supplanted by Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish. Gorani is a literary language for many Kurds.

Gorani had an estimated 180,000 speakers in Iran in 2007 and 120,000 speakers in Iraq as well in 2007 for a total of 300,000 speakers. Ethnologue and the Documentation of Endangered Languages reports that the language is threatened in both Iran and Iraq, and that speakers residing in Iraq includes all adults and some children, however it does not mention if speakers are shifting to Sorani or not. Many speakers of Gorani in Iran also speak Sorani, Persian, as well as Southern Kurdish. Most speakers in Iraq also speak Sorani, while some also speak Mesopotamian Arabic. Furthermore in the 2010 edition of UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger Gorani (Hawrami) was classified as an endangered north-western Iranic language.

The name Goran appears to be of Indo-Iranian origin. The name may be derived from the old Avestan word, gairi, which means mountain.

Under the independent rulers of Ardalan (9th–14th / 14th–19th century), with their capital latterly at Sanandaj, Gorani became the vehicle of a considerable corpus of poetry. Gorani was and remains the first language of the scriptures of the Ahl-e Haqq sect, or Yarsanism, centered on Gahvara. Prose works, in contrast, are hardly known. The structure of Gorani verse is very simple and monotonous. It consists almost entirely of stanzas of two rhyming half-verses of ten syllables each, with no regard to the quantity of syllables.

The names of forty classical poets writing in Gorani are known, but the details and dates of their lives are unknown for the most part. Perhaps the earliest writer is Mele Perîşan, author of a masnavi of 500 lines on the Shi'ite faith who is reported to have lived around 1356–1431. Other poets are known from the 17th–19th centuries and include Shaykh Mustafa Takhtayi, Khana Qubadi, Yusuf Yaska, Mistefa Bêsaranî and Khulam Rada Khan Arkawazi. One of the last great poets to complete a book of poems (divan) in Gurani is Mawlawi Tawagozi south of Halabja.

The Kurdish Shahnameh is a collection of epic poems that has been passed down orally from one generation to the next. Eventually, some of these stories were written down by Almas Khan-e Kanoule'ei in the 18th century. There exist also a dozen or more long epic or romantic masnavis, mostly translated by anonymous writers from Persian literature including: Bijan and Manijeh, Khurshid-i Khawar, Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad, Haft Khwan-i Rostam and Sultan Jumjuma. Manuscripts of these works are currently preserved in the national libraries of Berlin, London, and Paris.

An excerpt from Şîrîn û Xesrew (Shirin and Khosrow), written in 1740 by Khana Qubadî: