Laki Verbal Particles

Considering that the affiliation and positioning of Laki with respect to Southern Kurdish (henceforth SK) and other Western Iranian contact languages are still surrounded by considerable debate, this paper attempts at investigating one of the features identified in the literature as relevant for a dialectological definition of Laki with respect to other regional languages. Indeed, the presence of peculiar (post)verbal particles – added to a set of quasi-homonymous postpositions—bundles Laki together with the majority of so-called Laki-Kermānshāhi dialects transitional to SK and distinguishes it from all its closest linguistic neighbours: SK, Gorani-Hawrami and Northern Lori.