The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between language practices and non-linguistic processes that affect the outcome of language shift and loss situations. The community under investigation form a small minority Kuwaiti-Persian ethnic group known as Ajam. The Ajam speak a distinct variety of Persian referred to as Eimi within a dominant Arabic speaking community. The language practices of Ajam are analysed within a language and political economy framework. Key notions such as capital, field, habitus, and symbolic domination (Bourdieu 1991) are used to understand not only why language shift has taken place, but also why Eimi is still used to some extent. To this end a combination of ethnographic methods and quantitative analysis was used to collect data from 140 questionnaires and 20 informal interviews. Analysis of the data shows that Eimi has limited linguistic capital that can be symbolically used as a marker of solidarity. However, the analysis also indicates that not only has Eiml been in a state of decline for some time but the use of Eimi has drastically declined among the youngest generation of Ajam. Essentially, Eimi does not function as a symbol of ethnic or religious identity. Furthermore, underlying the language shift process is the divergent language ideologies and attitudes towards Eimi and Arabic. Despite the expression of positive attitudes towards Eimi and the teaching of Eimi to future generations, negative ideologies in the form of the 'non-standard language' and negative effects of multilingualism' are the main catalyst in the language shift process. On the other hand, informants attached positive ideologies to Arabic as a symbol of Arab nationalism, as a divine language, and as a symbol of Kuwaiti identity. Through discussion of these findings this study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between language behavior, ideology, and identity in the face of language shift and loss.

The present thesis, as its title suggests, takes a wider view of intonation than has traditionally been adopted and this is made possible by the choice of the theoretical model explained in the first introductory chapter. In addition to the choice of theory the first chapter consists of the aims a of the thesis together with a survey of previous studies of Persian intonation, the nature of the corpus, the descriptive techniques and the system of notation employed. The functional use of pitch is investigated in chapter 2 while chapter 3 deals with the prosodic and paralinguistic features which are considered to be the related phenomena in the study of Persian intonation. A few areas of correlation between the intonation and grammar of Persian are explored in chapter 4 and the contribution of prosodic and paralinguistic features together with that of other non-segmental phenomena to the meaning of utterances is studied in the fifth and final chapter. Of the two appendices attached to the thesis, the first includes instrumental support for the tones described in chapter 2 while the second consists of two texts (together with their translations) which are given as further illustration of the description presented in the thesis. The bibliography is divided into two sections. The first consists of a list of the works referred to in the thesis and the second provides background reading.

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This thesis investigates the prosodic structure of Central Kurdish; a language whose phonology and prosody is poorly studied. Within the framework of Optimality Theory, rhythmic categories (mora, syllable and foot) and prosody-morphology interface category (Prosodic Word) of the language is addressed. The thesis also includes comparing the prosodic units (below phonological phrase) with the parametric variation for each constituent. This study fills the gap in the work of the prosodic system of Central Kurdish and on its phonology as such. Based on the data, the thesis also assesses the conflicting sub-theories of prosodic phonology: the view which sees phonological representation as a hierarchical organisation of units of which the higher prosodic units are defined in terms of lower ones against a different view which argues against constituency in phonology. Being theoretical in nature, the researcher’s intuition as a native speaker of the language under study is used for the description of the data. The validity of the data is being supported and cross-examined by the descriptive literature on the language. As it is described as the best method for interpreting prosodic phonology, Optimality Theory is used as the framework to analyse the data. The supporting evidence for each prosodic constituent is drawn from the (morpho)phonological processes that use the categories as the domain of their application. As the research question investigated covers a broad area in the prosody of Central Kurdish, the findings were wide-ranging and multi-layered. First, it was found that sequences of speech sounds are organised into constituents, which serve as the domain of certain phonological processes. Each prosodic constituent consists of at least a constituent of the lower constituent. Similar to syntactic categories, it was shown that prosodic categories (above syllable and foot) can be recursive and parsing can be non-exhaustive. Mora, though not a prosodic constituent within the prosodic hierarchy, can be sensitive to certain morphological processes and insensitive to phonological processes, i.e. sensitivity of processes can be a process-specific rather than language-specific. The significance of the findings of this thesis is twofold. First, it is the first analytical prosodic study of Central Kurdish. Second, which is theoretical, Prosodic structure, at least for Prosodic Word, matches a syntactic constituent.

This thesis presents a phonetic and phonological description of the nominal piece in Standard Colloquial Persian. The phonetic description is given in articulatory feature analysis as briefly outlined in paragraph 0.5. The phonological description is in prosodic terms. Intonation has been excluded from this thesis as it is primarily a sentence prosody.1 In order to achieve maximum congruence between the phonological and grammatical levels, the phonological statements are given within a grammatical framework outlined in parts at the beginning of the relevant chapters. The introduction gives the necessary information about the data analysed, previous analyses and some justification for the choice of the theory. A general discussion on syllable, some existing phonetic definitions, and the need for syllable is presented in Chapter 1 where a definition of syllable in Persian is suggested together with its types. The phonetic features observed in the data are described in Chapters 2 and 3 in. terms of syllable features and syllable segments. The phonetic features observed between syllables at morpheme boundaries as well as some rules for syllable division are given in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 provides further description of glottal, pre-glottal and long contoids. 1. For a description of intonation in Persian see J. Towhidi's "A Study of Intonation and Related Features of Persian ...", research for Ph.D. thesis, London University, S.O.A.S. In Chapter 6 the phonological structure of syllable is given and the syllable prosodies are stated. In Chapter 7 different phonematic systems are set up for different places in the syllable. The syllable structure of nominal words is set up in Chapter 8, and various prosodies of nominal words are described. Chapter 9 deals with the description of the nominal piece and junction prosodies which express the relation between the components of nominal piece. Chapter 10 provides a brief summary of some interesting experimental findings obtained with the help of the techniques of palatography, mingography and spectrography. Most of the descriptions based on perceptual analysis of the data are found to be supported by instrumental evidence.

This thesis examines the syntactic structure of clauses in Central Kurdish, focusing specifically on the syntax of verbs and verbal categories including tense, aspect, agreement, argument structure and their interplay with various verb types. It thus provides the first account to a number of syntactic phenomena in the language, which has not been subject to much detailed investigation before. In analysing the phrase structure for the language, a number of proposals concerning the derivation of affixes are reviewed. Within the current theory of syntax, suffixation of morphemes to lexical heads is derived via head movement, considering strict locality and the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), while prefixation is not derived by movement. Although such theory has a strong support from typological investigation (Julien 2002), it does not account for a language which has both prefixation and suffixation. Central Kurdish thus poses a serious challenge since inflected verbs are formed via both suffixation and prefixation. It is argued, however, that the difference in morpho-phonological properties between prefixes and suffixes brings about the difference in their method of derivation. This in turn accounts for much of the derivation of basic clause structure in the language. A distinguishing characteristic of the syntax of Central Kurdish is related to its agreement pattern. The thesis argues that the tense-based split ergativity in the language is best accounted for by a theory in which case can be assigned by agreement. Although there is no morphological realization of case in Central Kurdish, the agreement-driven approach adopted in this study accounts for the agreement morphemes and the pronominal clitics found within the verbal complex of the language. The difference in the nature of ‘present’ and ‘past’ verb stems is responsible for the difference in the clausal structure of past and present tense, which is clearly reflected in the crossed agreement (split-ergative) pattern. This study also accounts for the syntax of complex predicates in Central Kurdish in which light verbs are highly productive in their formulation. Any syntactic account of verbal inflections and agreement pattern is thus not complete if it cannot be applied to these complex predicates. It is shown that the composite of light verb plus the non-verbal element is responsible for the argument structure of the whole predicate. The analysis of the non-verbal elements, which have special characteristics, confirms the analysis proposed throughout the study, especially with regard to the account suggested for the split-ergative agreement of the language.

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This thesis examines the intersection of language, identity, language ideologies and attitudes in relation to national, regional, religious and gender identities among Kurdish, Turkish and English speaking multilingual Kurds of Turkey in the UK who are learning Kurmanji-Kurdish as their heritage language in community-based language classes in the UK. The central concern of this thesis is to explore the ways in which language is constructed as a salient marker of Kurdish identity in the UK diaspora. The process of Turkey's accession to the EU, along with greater cultural and linguistic demands of Kurds, has foregrounded the significance of language as a means of democratisation and conflict resolution. The armed conflict between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and the Turkish Republic which has been a problem since the 1980s is currently undergoing peace negotiations via a turbulent 'resolution process' (since 2009), tantamount to the 'peace process' initiated in 2012, where language and identity became an important part of the political negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish state. These macro-political developments have had a great impact on the emerging Kurdish language classes in the UK. More specifically, this thesis seeks to examine how national/ethnic identities (Anderson 2006; Hobsbawm 1996; Joseph 2004) as well as regional, religious and gender identities are hierarchised (Omoniyi 2006) in classroom interactions and semistructured interviews. The first part of the thesis draws on a systematic analysis of ethnographic data which predominantly focuses on languages and identities using Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS) (Gumperz 2001) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 2010; Wodak and Meyer 2009; Fairclough and Wodak 1997). The second part of the thesis investigates language attitudes (Azjen 1988; Baker 1992; Ryan et al. 1987) towards 'standard' or 'academic' (Bohtan Kürtc̦esi/southern dialect region) versus 'nonstandard' or 'vernacular' varieties such as that which is referred to as 'Maraș Kürtc̦esi' in Turkish or 'Kurmanjiya Mereșe' (northwestern dialect region see figure 1.3) in Kurdish, spoken in Kahramanmara., a city in southern Turkey. This aspect of the investigation takes a social psychological perspective. This thesis aims to contribute to the field of sociolinguistics in relation to the investigation of language and identity from a multidisciplinary and multi-analytical perspective.

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