Abstract The diverse dialects of Kurdish have long been the subject of scholarly debate on syllable structure, and this study examines the syllabification of Central Kurdish within the Optimality Theory framework. Data from a mini-corpus, drawn from native Central Kurdish speakers and enriched with findings from studies on Northern and Southern Kurdish dialects, provide the foundation for this investigation. The methodology involves extracting the constraints governing Central Kurdish’s syllable formation, where the nucleus consistently requires a single vowel and the onset is obligatory in a CV pattern that may extend to include a glide (forming CGV) at word-initial positions. The permissible coda appears either as a singleton or as part of a consonant cluster. Findings indicate that Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish converge on a shared constraint ranking, producing the canonical C(G)V(C)(C) structure. Northern Kurdish dialects, however, display greater variation, with some allowing an unrestricted second consonant (C(C)V(C)(C)) and others restricting cluster composition. A Hasse diagram is employed to visualize these constraint relationships, highlighting Optimality Theory’s capacity to model both a core, maximally constrained syllable structure and peripheral trends. These results provide crucial insights into the dynamic interplay of phonological constraints that shape syllable structure across Kurdish dialects, advancing a unified typological understanding of the language.
Mohammadi et al. (2025) studied this question.