Language attitudes and religion: Kurdish Alevis in the UK

In this article I report on results of a Matched Guise Tests (MGT) study investigating attitudes towards Bohtan (BHKr) and Maraş Kurmanji (MRKr) spoken among the UK diaspora. I focus on BHKr, which I use to refer to the Kurmanji that is identified as “good Kurmanji”, also referred to as “academic”/ “proper”, and MRKr to refer to the Kurmanji that is referred to as “bad Kurmanji” by Kurmanji speakers in the UK (Author 2018). The MGT, and questions pertaining to perceptual dialectology such as respondents’ perceptions of region, religion, gender and class in this study, show that attitudes towards what is perceived as BHKr and MRKr differ significantly. By concentrating on language attitudes towards Kurmanji which have never been studied in the UK context before, this paper investigates negative and positive evaluations of both BHKr and MRKr in relation to religious affiliation.