Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey

1.1.1 Kurmanjs and Kurmanji

Although the dialect division of the Kurdish language differs in different studies (for an overview see Haig and Öpengin 2014), researchers mostly agreed on the classification of three major groups: Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani), and Southern Kurdish (Kelhuri, Kirmashani, Feyli) (see Figure 1). Among these, the Kurdish dialect that is spoken in Turkey is Kurmanji.^[6] Although Kurmanjs mostly live in the Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia region, due to the migration in the last decades, they have spread all over Turkey, especially to the big cities such as İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir and Bursa. Besides, due to the social, economic and political migration, a significant number of Kurmanjs are living in Europe today (Haig and Matras 2002: 3).

The current size of the Kurmanji population in Turkey is a controversial issue. There is no recent official record regarding their population in Turkey. According to Ethnologue,^[7] the number of Kurmanji people in Turkey is 8,130,000. In Heper (2007), the number is estimated as 11,300,000, while the United States Center for World Mission estimates the number as 13,947,000 (Buran and Yüksel Çak 2012: 45). The only official record about Kurmanji populations in Turkey dates back to 1965. According to a census carried out in 1965,^[8] the number of Kurmanji speakers was 2,219,502 (Buran and Yüksel Çak 2012: 308). However, it is noteworthy to mention that Turkey’s total population in 1965 was 31,391,421 (see Andrews 2002 and Buran and Yüksel Çak 2012 for details), almost one third of the current population (83,614,312, according to an address-based population registration system).

It can be asserted that the majority of the Kurmanji people living in Turkey are bilingual (Öpengin 2010: 32). Yet, Kurmanji is mainly used as a spoken language since the language of education is Turkish and Kurmanji does not have an official status. However, in the last decade, several initiatives to strengthen the position of Kurmanji supported by the government have been undertaken. In 2009, the multilingual TV channel TRT 6 (currently known as TRT Kurdî) started broadcasting in Kurmanji. In addition, Kurmanji course books have been prepared by the ministry of education and Kurmanji has been presented as an elective course in schools. Nevertheless, it can be claimed that the number of Kurmanji speakers is decreasing. Nowadays Kurmanji is mostly spoken in rural areas and the new generation with higher education has higher proficiency in the Turkish language than in Kurmanji and cannot transmit Kurmanji to the next generations in the same way as their parents did (Öpengin 2010: 32).

Figure 1:

Map of Kurdish dialects in the world.⁹

1.1.2 Zazas and Zazaki

Zazas originally live in Turkey and Zazaki is the only local language that is originally spoken in Turkey only (Keskin 2010). However, due to migration, Zazas have spread across Europe as well, especially to Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, Switzerland and Sweden (Keskin 2015: 94). In Turkey, Zazas live mainly in Eastern Anatolia, especially in cities located at the upper part of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris such as Bingöl, Elazığ, Tunceli, Erzincan, and Diyarbakır (see Figure 2). They are also scattered across the following areas: Sivas, Erzincan, Gümüşhane, Erzurum, Kars, Muş, Siirt, Malatya, Kayseri and Adıyaman (Arslan 2018: 52). Zazaki is the second largest local language in Turkey as far as number of speakers is concerned. However, the exact number of Zazaki speakers is unknown. It ranges from 3 to 6 million in different studies. ^[9]According to Ethnologue,^[10] the population of Zazaki speakers is between 3–4 million, while in Keskin (2010), the number is estimated to be between 4–6 million.

Figure 2:

Map of Zazaki dialects in Turkey.

Based on morphological, semantic and lexical differences, Keskin (2015: 8) divides Zazaki into three main dialects, namely Northern Zazaki, Central Zazaki and Southern Zazaki.

Like Kurmanji, Zazaki is mainly a spoken language. According to Keskin (2010) there is no standard variety of Zazaki, which is understood by all native speakers. Zazaki selective courses have been given in schools since 2013 and the multilingual TV channel TRT6 has half an hour Zazaki daily broadcasting time. Since 2011, Zazaki studies have been introduced at Turkey’s universities (Mardin Artuklu University, Munzur University and Bingöl University, see Varol 2017). Despite these developments, we have observed that Zazaki people barely transmit their mother tongue to the next generations with a decreasing number of Zazaki speakers as a result.

1.2.1 Villages involved in the present study

For this study, the Kurmanji speakers were selected from Muratbağı and Yarımca villages in the Kovancılar district and the Zazaki speakers from Baltaşı and Karasalkım villages in Palu district (see Figure 4). These villages have a reasonable number of native Kurmanji or Zazaki speakers. When disregarding the capital, the Yarımca and Baltaşı villages accommodate two of the biggest Kurmanji populations in Elazığ (1,143 inhabitants in Yarımca and 1,138 in Baltaşı). The populations of the Zazaki villages Muratbağı (331 inhabitants) and Karasalkım (765 inhabitants) are smaller. Using the main road, the distance from Muratbağı to Baltaşı is 15.1 km and to Karasalkım 20.7 km. The distance from Yarımca to Baltaşı is 17.4 km and to Karasalkım 23.8 km. The Kurmanji and the Zazaki villages are separated by the Keban Dam, which was built in 1975. The travel distances between the villages were even smaller before the dam was constructed.

Figure 4:

The villages included in the present investigation, Kurmanji Muratbağı and Yarımca, and Zazaki Baltaşı and Karasalkım.

The closeness of the villages means that the inhabitants in principle have relatively easy access to exposure to each other’s languages. However, we have little information about the frequency and intensity of contact between inhabitants in the Kurmanji and Zazaki villages. The communities in the region share economic, sociological and cultural common grounds. Such common grounds are usually likely to result in contact between the inhabitants. However, since Turkish is mostly used for communication in the area, it is uncertain how much exposure speakers of Kurmanji and Zazaki actually have to each other’s languages.

3.1.1 Functional intelligibility

Figure 5 presents percentages of correctly translated words for male and female Kurmanji and Zazaki listeners. The data were averaged over the 41 nouns and 41 verbs. The scores are quite low. With an exception of the translations by male Zazaki listeners (20.7% correct), all mean word translation scores are below 15 percent.

Figure 5:

Mean percentage correct translations, broken down for gender and language of listeners.

A two-way ANOVA was conducted that examined the effect of gender and listeners’ language on the level of intelligibility. A simple main effects analysis showed that the difference between Kurmanji (14.5% correct translation) and Zazaki listeners (14.3% correct) was not significant (F [1, 65] = 0.010, p = 0.919). The male listeners translated significantly more words correctly (17.5% correct) than female listeners (11.3%), (F [1, 65] = 6.483, p = 0.011). There was a statistically significant interaction between the effects of gender and language on the level of intelligibility (F [1, 65] = 7.388, p = 0.007). A dependent sample t-test showed that the Kurmanji female listeners performed significantly better (14.8% correct) than the Zazaki female listeners (7.8% correct) (t = 5.764, p < 0.001) while the Zazaki male listeners performed better (20.7% correct) than the Kurmanji male listeners (14.3% correct, t = 6.607, p < 0.001).

3.1.2 Estimated intelligibility

As explained in the beginning of Section 2, listeners are often well capable of judging how well they can understand a closely related neighbouring language. We tested how the Zazaki and Kurmanji listeners estimated their own ability to understand the neighbouring language before they took part in the functional intelligibility test. The listeners were asked to indicate on a five-point scale from 1 ‘I do not understand a word’ to 5 ‘I understand everything’ how well they expected to understand the test language (estimated intelligibility).

The estimated intelligibility scores are presented in Figure 6. We first of all note that the scores are quite low. Most mean scores are below 2 on the five-point scale and also the group with the highest score, the Kurmanji men, only estimate their own ability to understand Zazaki with a mean score of 2.3.

Figure 6:

Mean estimated intelligibility scores on a scale from 1 ‘I do not understand a word’ to 5 ‘I understand everything’ as a function of gender for the Zazaki and the Kurmanji listeners.

A two-way ANOVA was conducted that examined the effect of gender and native language of the listeners on the level of estimated intelligibility. This analysis showed that Kurmanji listeners are more optimistic (mean 2.0) about their own ability to understand the neighbouring language than the Zazaki listeners (mean 1.6). The differences are significant at the 0.05 level (F [1,65] = 4.4749, p = 0.033, η_p² = 0.068). Furthermore, men are more positive about their own abilities than women (mean 2.1 vs. 1.3). This difference is significant at the 0.01 level (F [1,65] = 13.360, p = 0.001). No interaction was found between gender and listeners’ language (F [1,65] = 0.133, p = 0.000).

To get an impression of how well the listeners can estimate their understanding of the test language, we compare the results to the mean functional intelligibility scores. It is not possible to determine to which extent the listeners can estimate intelligibility in an absolute sense, since different methods are used for the measurements. However, it is apparent that both the functional and the estimated intelligibility scores are quite low. A comparison of the functional and estimated intelligibility scores show that in general the relative scores of the of the functional and estimated measurements show the same pattern: Kurmanji listeners understand more than Zazaki listeners and Kurmanji women understand more than Zazaki women. However, there is one major difference. When tested functionally, Zazaki men perform better than Kurmanji men (mean scores of 23.0 and 18.1%), but when asked to estimate their intelligibility of the test language, Kurmanji men score slightly higher (mean 2.3) than Zazaki men (mean 1.9). This difference is not significant t = −1.215, p = 0.23). When tested functionally, Kurmanji women perform just as well as the Kurmanji men, but there is a difference between the Kurmanji men and women in the case of estimated intelligibility. The men are more positive about their ability to understand Zazaki than the women. This difference is significant (t = −2.034, p = 0.05).

We can also compare the mean functional scores and the estimated intelligibility scores by correlating them. If we correlate the scores of all 69 listeners, we get a significant score at the 0.01 level (r = 0.37). When looking at the correlations broken down for language and gender we get significant correlations between the mean intelligibility scores and estimated intelligibility at the 0.05 level for Zazaki women (r = 0.61), Kurmanji women (r = 0.64) and Zazaki men (r = 0.51). However, for the Kurmanji men the correlation is non-significant (r = −0.09). It seems that Kurmanji men are less good at estimating their own ability to understand the neighbouring languages than the other listener’s groups.

3.2.1 Exposure

Exposure to the test language has often been shown to be crucial for the intelligibility of a closely related language. For example, Gooskens and Van Heuven (2019) found a correlation of r = 0.90 between functional intelligibility as measured by a spoken cloze test and the mean exposure as measured on six scales. The more exposure to a language the better the listeners are at understanding the language because they learn some of the vocabulary and get used to sound correspondences between their native language and the related language. There are different ways of measuring exposure. Here we will first look at the relationship between age and intelligibility and next we will investigate the relationship between the exposure scores that the listeners gave when filling in the questionnaire and the mean intelligibility scores.

As became clear from Table 1, the listeners cover a large range of ages between 16 and 78 years. It is reasonable to assume that older listeners have had the chance to have more exposure to a neighboring language than young people. In addition, the older listeners are from a time when the dam had not yet been built and the distance between the villages was smaller (see Section 1.2.1). On the other hand, the roads and the means of transportation were of lower quality at that time.

The correlation between age and the mean functional intelligibility scores is non-significant (r = 0.11). When we correlate with the results broken down for language and gender, we still get non-significant correlations for all groups, except for the Zazaki men where the correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (r = 0.65). This means that Zazaki men get better at understanding the neighboring languages with age, while there are no clear age effect for the other groups.

In Figure 7, we present the mean exposure scores broken down for language and gender. In general, the listeners have little exposure to the neighbouring language in spite of the fact that the villages are geographically very close. Kurmanji listeners have more exposure to Zazaki than the other way round (mean exposure score 2.4 vs. 1.6 on a scale from 1 ‘no exposure’ to 5 ‘almost every day’). A one-way ANOVA showed that this difference is significant (F [1,65] = 14.951, p = 0.000). Men are more often exposed to the neighbouring language than women (F [1,65] = 9.539, p = 0.003). An independent sample t-test showed that the Kurmanji female listeners had significantly more exposure (mean score 2.2) than the Zazaki female listeners (mean 1.1, p = 0.002), while the difference between the men (Kurmanji 2.5 and Zazaki 2.0) was insignificant, p = 0.059. The interaction between gender and language of the listeners was not significant.

Figure 7:

Mean exposure as a function of gender for the Zazaki and the Kurmanji listeners on a scale from 1 ‘never’ to 5 ‘almost every day’.

Looking now at the relationship between intelligibility and exposure scores, we see that even though the Kurmanji men are most often exposed to the test language they do no perform best on the functional intelligibility tests. The other three groups follow the same patterns for intelligibility and exposure. The Zazaki women have almost no exposure and low intelligibility scores. The Kurmanji women have lower exposure scores than Kurmanji men (t = −0.908, p = 0.37) but their intelligibility scores do not differ significantly. The exposure scores of all listeners correlate significantly with the mean intelligibility scores at the 0.01 level (r = 0.38). When we correlate for each of the languages and genders separately, we get significant correlations at the 0.01 level for both Zazaki groups (women r = 0.64, men r = 0.57) and at the 0.05 level for the female Kurmanji listeners (r = 67). In the case of the male Kurmanji listeners the correlation is nonsignificant (r = −0.19). This confirms previous findings that in general listeners get better at understanding the neighbouring languages when they have had more exposure to the language. However, in the case of the Kurmanji men such a link is not found.

3.2.2 Attitude

Attitudes towards the test language is another factor that has repeatedly been mentioned in the literature as a factor influencing intelligibility scores (Delsing and Lundin Åkesson 2005; Schüppert et al. 2015). In Figure 8, the mean attitude scores across the five scale are presented, broken down for language and gender.

Figure 8:

Mean attitudes (from 1 = most positive to 5 = most negative) across all scales as a function of gender for the Zazaki and the Kurmanji listeners.

The Zazaki listeners are a little more negative towards the neighboring language than the Kurmanji listeners (mean across all scales 3.2 vs. 2.8). However, a two-way ANOVA showed that the difference was nonsignificant (F [1,65] = 3.408, p = 0.069). Women are more negative than men (3.3 vs. 2.8). This difference is significant at the 0.05 level (F [1,65] = 5.346, p = 0.024). An independent t-test showed that the differences between Zazaki females (3.5) and Kurmanji females (3.1) was non-significant (p = 0.081) and also the differences between Zazaki males (3.0) and Kurmanji males (2.7) is non-significant (p = 0.30). The interaction between gender and listeners’ language is not significant (F[1,65] = 0.095, p = 0.759).

When comparing the attitude scores with the intelligibility scores we would expect negative correlations. More negative listeners could be expected to get the lowest scores on the intelligibility test, since they may not be willing to make an effort to understand a language they have a negative attitude towards while positive listeners may be willing to make a larger effort. When comparing the data in Figure 8 to the mean intelligibility scores presented in Figure 5, this seems to be only partly the case in our data. The most positive listeners (the male Kurmanji listeners) are not the best at understanding. However, the most negative listeners (the female Zazaki listeners) also have the lowest intelligibility scores. To analyse the role of attitudes statistically, we correlated the mean intelligibility scores with the mean attitude scores. The correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (r = −0.27). However, when looking at each group separately, none of the correlations are significant. The link between intelligibility and attitudes therefore is rather weak. It seems that the listeners generally do not have very strong negative opinions about the other language, since they tended to use the middle of the scale. This results in low correlations.

3.3.1 The intelligibility of cognate and non-cognate words

By identifying cognate words in Kurmanji and Zazaki, we can determine the lexical overlap of the two languages. The degree of lexical overlap between two languages is likely to be very fundamental for predicting the level of intelligibility. If two languages share no vocabulary, the languages are in principle not mutually intelligible unless the listeners have had exposure to the test language, and the larger the lexical overlap the larger the mutual intelligibility will be. However, the fact that a word is a cognate does not mean that the listener will always be able to match it with the counterpart in his own language. The pronunciation of cognate words in two related languages may have changed to such an extent that a listener will no longer recognize them as cognates.

To be able to investigate the role of cognacy for the mutual intelligibility of Kurmanji and Zazaki, we first need to identify cognate words in two languages. Since no prior study of the etymologies of Kurmanji and Zazaki words has been conducted, some difficulties were encountered while preparing the list of cognate words. The only etymological dictionary that could be used for such a list is Cabolov (2001, 2010, which gives detailed analysis of Kurmanji words, while for Zazaki, no such dictionary is found. Since Cabolov (2001, 2010 not only gives detailed information about Kurmanji words, but also mentions cognates in the related languages (such as Persian, Zazaki etc.), we have used his dictionary as the main source to prepare the list. For the words that are not found in this dictionary, we consulted several articles (e.g., Aratemür 2012; Cheung 2007; Keskin 2012; Selcan 2011). In two cases where we could not use etymological dictionaries to determine the cognacy of test words, words that are phonetically similar and semantically identical were listed as cognates even though there are no studies mentioning them: Kurmanji keştî, Zazaki keştî^[14] ‘ship’ and Kurmanji hez kirin, Zazaki hes kerdiş ‘to love’.

Of the total number of 82 words used in the study, 38 are cognates, which equals 46.3% of the total amount. When analyzed according to word classes we see that more verbs than nouns are cognates in the two languages: of the 41 nouns, 15 are cognates (36.5%) and of the 41 verbs, 22 are cognates (56.0%).

In Figure 9, we present the intelligibility results for the cognates and the non-cognates. As expected, the percentage of correct translations of cognate words is higher (mean percentage of correct translation 20.4) than non-cognates (mean 9.3%). A two-way ANOVA showed that the difference is significant (F [1,120] = 21.723, p < 0.000).

Figure 9:

Mean percentages of correct translations of cognates and non-cognates for male and female Zazaki and Kurmanji listeners.

Kurmanji men and women had the same level of understanding of the cognates, even though the men claimed to have more exposure to Zazaki than the women did (see Figure 7). In the case of the Zazaki, the men scored higher than the females, as could be expected from the exposure scores. Because of the higher exposure, Zazaki males were better at recognizing phonetic correspondences between two languages, i.e. Kurmanji baran, Zazaki varu ‘rain’ was translated correctly by 47.7% by Zazaki males, while none of Zazaki female participants had a correct answer.

As expected, the percentages of correct translations were lower in the case of the non-cognates (Kurmanji listeners 11.9% and Zazaki listeners 7.40.0%). The difference is found among both men and women. The intelligibility of non-cognate words by Zazaki female listeners is 4.9% (cf. 11.0% for cognates), by Zazaki male listeners 9.8% (cf. for cognates 35.6%) and by Kurmanji female listeners 11.1% (cf. 19.8% for cognates), by Kurmanji male listeners 12.7% (cf. 20.9% for cognates).

The fact that all groups were able to translate some frequent non-cognates correctly shows that they must have some knowledge of the test languages. In principle, it is not possible to recognize a non-cognate without previous knowledge of the language. For example, 38.1% of the Kurmanji males and 15.4% of the females translated Zazaki astor ‘horse’ correctly and 18.2% of the Zazaki males and 12.5% of the females translated the Kurmanji non-cognate hesp correctly. However, the percentages of correctly translated non-cognates only reflect the exposure scores presented in Section 3.2.1 to a certain extent. Both Kurmanji men and women claimed to have more exposure to the other language than Zazaki listeners, but still the Zazaki men were just as good as the Kurmanji listeners at translating non-cognates. Asymmetric scores can often be explained by other factors, which will be discussed in the next section.

Finally, we also had a look at the differences between the percentages correct translations of cognate nouns and verbs. A two-way ANOVA showed that the difference between verbs and nouns is not significant (F[1,143] = 0.867, p = 0.353). However, in the next section we will discuss some differences in intelligibility of some individual verbs.

3.3.2 Asymmetric intelligibility

By having a closer look at word pairs that show asymmetric intelligibility, we may gain a better understanding of factors determining intelligibility. In this section, we will present examples of a number of such factors. It has previously been shown that linguistic factors may cause an asymmetric intelligibility between languages (for an overview see Gooskens and Van Heuven 2021). In Table 2, we present a list of words with a mean asymmetric intelligibility between the Kurmanji and the Zazaki listeners. We defined asymmetry as a difference between the mean scores for a word above 15% between gender groups in two languages.

There are 17 words in our list with asymmetric mean scores above 15%. Zazaki listeners had higher scores of 9 words, and Kurmanji listeners of 8 words. In most of the cases Zazaki female listeners had the lowest score which caused overall asymmetric scores. This could have given an explanation for the asymmetric intelligibility scores in our study, since the Zazaki female listeners had almost no exposure to the test language. However, the low exposure score could only explain the asymmetric scores for some of the words such as ‘mouth’, ‘to talk’ and ‘to understand’, which were translated correctly by none of the Zazaki female listeners (see Table 2). Yet, the same explanation cannot be found for other words. This shows that there is no 1 to 1 correlation between exposure and asymmetric scores. Thus, most of the asymmetric scores require an additional explanation.

We have identified some linguistic and non-linguistic factors that may have played a role, namely verb conjugation, knowing another language and synonyms. We will discuss these factors below.

3.3.3 Verb conjugation

One of the reasons for the asymmetric intelligibility of some word pairs is that the language structure of Zazaki gives an advantage to Zazaki speakers in understanding some Kurmanji verbs, while Kurmanji speakers do not have this advantage. In Kurmanji, the infinitive form of the verbs are similar to that of some conjugated forms (generally past and imperative forms) in Zazaki. In our data set, there are two examples. Kurmanji hatin means ‘to come’ or ‘they have come’ and Kurmanji gotın means ‘to say’ or ‘they have said’. Due to the similarities between conjugated forms of Zazaki and infinitives of Kurmanji, Zazaki speakers could infer the meaning of some verbs. On the other hand, the infinitive form in Zazaki is different and therefore difficult for Kurmanji listeners to recognize. Therefore, the Kurmanji listeners have low scores for some of the words. For example, the infinitive form of the Zazaki verb ‘give’ is deyiş while the conjugated form for 2nd person imperative is bıdın. When Zazaki speakers were asked to translate the infinitive form of the Kurmanji verb dayîn ‘to give’, they could understand the meaning (males 81.8% and females 25.0%) since they associate it with the imperative 2nd person plural form of the verb deyiş (which is bıdın) which is similar to the Kurmanji infinitive (dayîn). The same situation applies for the verb ‘to die’ mirin in Kurmanji and merdış in Zazaki (95.5% correct translations among male Zazaki listeners and 25% among Zazaki female listeners). Because Kurmanji mirin is very similar to 3rd person plural progressive form, merıni ‘They are dying’ in Zazaki, Zazaki participants had higher scores then Kurmanji listeners.

3.3.4 Knowing another language

Knowing a language other than the test language may have an effect on intelligibility scores. In this study, listeners’ knowledge of Turkish helped them to understand some of the test words and in two cases and it resulted in asymmetric intelligibility. The situation was encountered in the example of the word for ‘farmer’ (Kurmanji cotkar; Zazaki rencber). Zazaki listeners did not understand the Kurmanji word, but the Kurmanji listeners were often able to understand the Zazaki word rencber, since the same word is used in Turkish as rençber.

Another example is the word for ‘three’ (Kurmanji sê; Zazaki hirê) for which the male Zazaki listeners had high scores (64.8%). The reason is probably that the game of backgammon is traditionally played with Persian numbers (yek ‘one’, do ‘two’, se ‘three’) which are also used in Kurmanji. Therefore, it may be easier for Zazaki male listeners to understand the Kurmanji word sê ‘three’ since they know the word from the game. The fact that only 9.4% of the Zazaki female listeners had correct answer is because the game is played by males in men’s coffee houses and therefore females are not exposed to this word.

3.3.5 Synonyms

When the test word itself is unfamiliar to the listener, a synonym word may often help them to give correct answers. This situation has been determined for four nouns and four verbs.

While the most frequently used word for ‘hair’ in the Zazaki dialect of our research area is gıjık, the synonym Zazaki word por helped Zazaki speakers to understand the Kurmanji word por. None of the Kurmanji listeners had a correct answer, because they could not profit from a cognate synonym. The same advantage explain the asymmetric scores for the words ‘sock’, ‘bride’, ‘grandfather’ and ‘WC’. The Kurmanji word gurik ‘sock’ and bûk ‘bride’ also exists in the Zazaki and Zazaki word pîrık in Kurmanji. The word destawxane is a compound word, consisting of dest ‘hand’ + aw ‘water’ + xane ‘house’, all of which also exist in Kurmanji.

The verbs for ‘to recognize’, ‘to understand’, and ‘to talk’ in both languages are light verb constructions (LVC) which consists of a noun and a light verb kirin or kerdiş, meaning ‘to do’. Therefore, when there is a synonym for the first part of LVC in the source language, listeners may have an advantage during the test. For example, the Kurdish word nas exists in the Zazaki, the Zazaki word qal, and fehm in Kurmanji. Therefore, for the Kurmanji word naskirin ‘to recognize’ Zazaki participants had an advantage over Kurmanji participants and for the Zazaki word fehm kerdiş ‘to understand’ Kurmanji participants over Zazaki participants.

We could not find any explanation for the asymmetric scores of the words ‘autumn’ and ‘snow’. Interestingly, the word for ‘autumn’ is poorly understood by Zazaki female listeners (31.1%), even though the word is the same in both languages, payîz. The score of Zazaki male listeners (50.0%) for ‘snow’ could be explained by the exposure score, but Kurmanji participants claimed to have more exposure to the test language than Zazaki males.