Both languages distinguishes between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops. Similar vowel phonemes Literature and broadcast programs[ edit ] The first written statements in Zaza were compiled by the linguist Peter Lerch in The use of the Latin script to write Zaza became popular only in the diaspora in Sweden, France and Germany at the beginning of the s. This was followed by the publication of magazines and books in Turkey, particularly in Istanbul. The efforts of Zaza intellectuals to advance the comprehensibility of their native language by using that alphabet helped the number of publications in Zaza multiply.
This rediscovery of the native culture by Zaza intellectuals not only caused a renaissance of Zaza language and culture but it also triggered feelings among younger generations of Zazas who, however, rarely speak Zaza as a mother tongue in favor of this modern Western use of Zaza, rekindling their interest in their ancestral language. The diaspora has also generated a limited amount of Zaza language broadcasting. Grammar[ edit ] As with a number of other Indo-Iranian languages like the Kurdish languages , Zaza features split ergativity in its morphology , demonstrating ergative marking in past and perfective contexts, and nominative-accusative alignment otherwise.
Syntactically it is nominative-accusative. Each noun belongs to one of those two genders. In order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. Most nouns have inherent gender. However, some nominal roots have variable gender, i.
For example, the masculine preterite participle of the verb kerdene "to make" or "to do" is kerde; the feminine preterite-participle is kerdiye. Both have the sense of the English "made" or "done". The grammatical gender of the preterite-participle would be determined by the grammatical gender of the noun representing the thing that was made or done.
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of gender , although they interact closely in many languages.
