Sonqori, also known as Sonqori Turkic, is a Turkic dialect spoken in Sonqor (Sunqur), east of Kermānšāh, in a large valley separated from the rest of Kurdistan. According to the

Turkologist Turkology (or Turcology or Turkic studies) is a complex of humanities sciences studying languages, history, literature, folklore, culture, and ethnology of people speaking Turkic languages and the Turkic peoples in chronological and comparative c ...

Michael Knüppel, Sonqori is one of the Southern Oghuz dialects of Iran alongside Qashqai and Äynallu. He notes that K. H. Menges had already characterized Sonqori, together with Qashqai and Äynallu, as a transitional form between Azerbaijani and

Khorasani Turkic Khorasani Turkic or Khorasani Turkish is an Oghuz Turkic language spoken in the North Khorasan Province and the Razavi Khorasan Province in Iran. Nearly all Khorasani Turkic speakers are also bilingual in Persian. Geographic distribution Khora ...

. Turkologist

Gerhard Doerfer Gerhard Doerfer (8 March 1920 – 27 December 2003) was a German Turkologist, Altaicist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages, especially Khalaj. Biography Doerfer was born on March 8, 1920, in Königsberg (pres ...

identifies Sonqori as a possible dialect of Azerbaijani, or as a distinctive variety of Southern Oghuz/Afshar.

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

and

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...

list it as a South Azerbaijani dialect. Knowledge of the dialect was scant prior to the expeditions of the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...

. About 40,000 speakers of Sonqori exist in the Sonqor area.

Phonology

Vowels

References

Literature

* * * * Agglutinative languages Languages of Iran Oghuz languages Azerbaijani language dialects Turkic languages {{Iran-stub