Indirectness as Conversational Style in Badini Kurdish Discourse

Abstract

The current study explores indirectness as a register of Badini Kurdish discourse on the basis of Tannen’s theory of conversational style. Badini Kurdish, a dialect of Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish) spoken mainly in the Duhok Governorate of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, remains relatively unexamined in discourse-pragmatic studies.  Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this study identifies indirectness as it appears through hedging, mitigation, storytelling, proverbs, metaphors, questions as substitutes for commands, silence and narrative framing by means of qualitative discourse analysis, supported by quantitative analysis of the distribution and frequencies of these strategies in a corpus of Discourse Completion Task responses produced by native Badini speakers across diverse age groups, genders, and rural and urban locations. The analysis of these features is framed within Tannen’s distinction between highly participatory and highly considerate interaction styles, as well as exploring the potential roles of maneuvering as a mechanism for building rapport, a face-saving strategy, and an indicator of power and solidarity. The quantitative results show that indirect strategies constitute the majority of responses, with narrative framing and proverbs occurring most frequently, while silence appears comparatively less often. The findings indicate that Badini Kurdish discourse combines characteristics of active participation and strong consideration for others, and demonstrate how indirectness plays vital social roles in relation to the relative age of the participants, appropriate communication styles for women and men, and community solidarity. This study also provides cross-cultural evidence for conversational style theories, as it is among the first studies to systematically examine pragmatism in Kurdish dialects.