Zaza

Last Updated: 2020-07-06

COMPROMISED: conflicting orthographies make for possible conflation of vowels

Background

Language Family: Indo-European / Indo-Iranian / Iranian / Western / Northwestern / Zaza-Gorani

• The language is also sometimes known as Zazaki or Dimli and it is spoken throughout Turkey.

Phonology

Consonants

• /sˤ/, /t̪ˤ/, and /ʕ/ are marginal (Todd 2002, 1).
  • /t̪ˤ/ and /ʕ/ only occur in Arabic loanwords, but they are considered to be part of the phonemic inventory.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Stops	p b	t̪ t̪ˤ d̪				k ɡ	q
Affricates				tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v		s sˤ z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		ħ ʕ	h
Nasals	m		n
Trills			r
Flaps			ɾ
Approximants	w		l ɫ		j
Note: For cells that have two phonemes, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced. Phonemes that have the diacritic (ˤ) are pharyngealized. Both alveolar approximants are voiced, but the one on the right is velarized.

Vowels

• Todd (2002) includes /ə/ rather than /ɜ/ (p. 21); however, I opted to use /ɜ/ given that they describe it as a “mid open central vowel,” which is lower than schwa.
• Zaza has a number of diphthongs, all of which are spelled as a sequence of the two sounds that comprise them (e.g. /əj/ is written as ⟨ey⟩ and so forth) (Todd 2002, 16).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Near-High			ʊ
Mid	e		o
Low-Mid		ɜ
Low			ɑ

Diphthongs
/oj/, /ʊj/, /ɑj/, /ɑw/, /ɜj/, /ɜw/

Alphabet

• This orthography is somewhat compromised because the transcription of ⟨i⟩ differs depending on the orthography. By default, my ruleset only supports the orthography that maps ⟨i⟩ to /i/; however, rules for the other orthography are included but commented out in the ruleset, so by uncommenting those lines, the other orthography can be represented.
• NOTE: /ħ/ is not represented in the Crúbadán corpus.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/ɑ/
b	/b/
c	/dʒ/
ç	/tʃ/
d	/d̪/
e; é	/ɜ/
ê	/e/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
ğ	/ɣ/
h	/h/
’h	/ħ/
ı	/ɨ/
i	/i/; /ɨ/	/i/: in orthographies with ⟨ı⟩; /ɨ/: in orthographies with ⟨î⟩
î	/i/	in some orthographies
j	/ʒ/
k	/k/
l	/l/
’l	/ɫ/	in some orthographies
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
q	/q/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
’s	/sˤ/	in some orthographies
ş	/ʃ/
t	/t̪/
’t	/t̪ˤ/	in some orthographies
u	/ʊ/
û	/u/	in some orthographies
ü	/u/	in some orthographies
v	/v/
w	/w/
x	/x/
y	/j/
z	/z/
’	/ʕ/	in loanwords
Digraph
lh	/ɫ/	in some orthographies
rr	/r/
sh	/sˤ/	in some orthographies
th	/t̪ˤ/	in some orthographies

Syllable Structure

• Zaza has a (C)(C)V(C)(C) syllable structure.
  • Note, however, that - with the exception of the word - Zaza does not allow syllables to contain both an onset cluster and a coda cluster (Todd 2002, 24–25).

Lenition Rules

• /b/ spirantizes to [v] in postvocalic position, as well as in a handful of loanwords (Todd 2002, 10–11).
• /dʒ/ spirantizes to [ʒ] postvocalically (Todd 2002, 11).
• Word-final /n/, if preceded by /ɑ/ or /ə/, is realized only as a nasalization of the vowel. This pattern also holds if there’s an intervening /j/ (ibid.).
• Word-final /n/, if preceded by a vowel not mentioned in the previous rule, deletes entirely (Todd 2002, 13).

Misc. Rules

• Word-final /ng/ collapses to [ŋ] (Todd 2002, 12).
• Vowels become marginally lower and farther back when following a pharyngeal or pharyngealized consonant, or when following /ɫ/ (Todd 2002, 17).
• Postvocalic /i/ is realized as [j] (ibid.).
• Epenthesis of [w] occurs between /u/ and front vowels (ibid.).
• The sequence /ii/ shortens to [i] (Todd 2002, 18).

References

Todd, Terry Lynn. 2002. A Grammar of Dimili, Also Known as Zaza. Iremet Förlag.