Jacobson’s Distinctive Features and the Analysis of assimilation in Kurdish Bahdini local dialect

Abstract

Distinctive Features are generally used to describe the smallest units of sound in both phonetic and phonological analyses which aims to differentiate between the meaning of one word and another in a certain language. The topic of distinctive features has always caught the interest of phonologists and many schoolars used these features as the smallest units of sounds in order to describe sound features in all human languages. This research is an attempt to represent the distinctive features of Kurdish language, as well as to explain assimilation through Jacobson,s Distinctive Features in order to reach some phonological rules in Kurdish language. Samples are taken and analysed from revels written by speakers from the center of Duhok in order to represent the distinctive features of the sounds which affect the adjacent sounds, as well as creating the rules of the sounds which affect each other. Jacobson’s features are mainly based on a acoustic description of sounds.

The most important hypotheses of this research show that this theory meets the following requisitions:  Distinctive Features (DFs) can describe a natural class of sounds. They can also describe the distinctions of  sounds in all languages of the world and these features can be defined phonological. In conolusion it is clear that in Bahdini local dialect, The changes often affect the sound which carries the feature (±voiced) of stop and fricative sounds in general, and upon the feature (+voiced) of fricative in novel particularly.