THE ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE CHANGE IN THE KURDISH NARRATIVES PRODUCED BY 60 KURDISH-PERSIAN BILINGUALS

Bilinguals are special speakers of language, capable of speaking two different languages. It is obvious that bilinguals’ languages are always in contact and they can affect one another (sometimes) undesirably. This is why they usually “mix” their languages helplessly. Transference is not limited to phonetic levels rather lexical and syntactic are undoubtedly included in this phenomenon. In this paper we analyze the Ilami Kurdish narratives produced by 60 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals to show this transference. We will also discuss how the vulnerable parts of their first language (Ilami) are affected by the more powerful language (Persian). These students were requested to retell a pictorial story known as “The Frog Story” to show the impact of Persian as an official language through three mentioned levels of language. By analyzing our data we concluded that attrition ally Persian is neutralizing such Ilami phones (or allophones) as “?? -u”, “g-?” and “r-?”. At the morph syntactic level, some lexical and not grammatical items (i.e. plural marker and definiteness marker) are likely to be mixed