The authenticity of diminutive in Kurdish

الملخص EN

This paper is a descriptive study of diminutive forms in Kurdish morphology as concerns form, morphological process and parts of speech.

In addition, it sheds some lights on the senses of these structures.

The materials and data are taken from the southern dialect of the Kurdish language and mainly taken out from the (Kurdistan) dictionary written by Gîw Mukriyanî and other accessible related resources in the Kurdish language.

The morphological process which the diminutive forms go through is known as clipping and affixation.

In reality, this procedure requires adding a suffix or suffixes at the end of a specified word.

In this respect, it is of greatest importance to say that much of the word formation in Kurdish takes place externally, i.e.

affixing.

However, such a process is not random, but it follows some fixed patterns totally in accordance with the morphological structure of any given form to be diminuted.

The aim of using diminutive names is to show a specific aim which reveals the feelings about the speaker to the hearer.

The purposes of diminutives are either to convey positive or negative meaning and at other times for making those names easy for articulation.