یەکانەتینستە مرۆڤایرى زانکۆ بۆ زا گۆڤا بەرگى.23 ، ژمارە.1 ، ساڵى2019 269 Vol.23, No.1, 2019 The Authenticity of Diminutive in Kurdish ID No. 2046 (PP 269 - 277) https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.23.1.18 Hunar O. Padar Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Koya University hunar.omer@koyauniversity.org Received: 08/02/2018 Accepted: 21/11/2018 Published: 15/02/2019 Abstract This paper is a descriptive study of diminutive forms in Kurdish morphology as concerns form, morphological process and parts of speech. In addition, it sheds some lights on the senses of these structures. The materials and data are taken from the southern dialect of the Kurdish language and mainly taken out from the (Kurdistan) dictionary written by Gîw Mukriyanî and other accessible related resources in the Kurdish language. The morphological process which the diminutive forms go through is known as clipping and affixation. In reality, this procedure requires adding a suffix or suffixes at the end of a specified word. In this respect, it is of greatest importance to say that much of the word formation in Kurdish takes place externally, i.e. affixing. However, such a process is not random, but it follows some fixed patterns totally in accordance with the morphological structure of any given form to be diminuted. The aim of using diminutive names is to show a specific aim which reveals the feelings about the speaker to the hearer. The purposes of diminutives are either to convey positive or negative meaning and at other times for making those names easy for articulation. Keywords: diminutive formation, diminutive meaning, diminutive functions, diminutive of proper names, diminutive of adjectives 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 AIM ince the diminutive forms exist in many languages, the present research is an attempt to investigate how they are formed, which morphological process they undergo and which parts of speech they incorporate. Moreover, the research is also expected to shed some light on the meaning (s) these forms convey. 1.2 DATA COLLECTION The material which could adequately serve as a basis for the present research stems largely from some authentic data extracted mainly from the (Kurdistan) dictionary by Gîw Mukriyanî and other available relevant references in the Kurdish language. 1.3 WORD FORMATION PROCESSES One of the distinctive properties of human language is creativity, by which we mean the ability of native speakers of a language to produce and understand unknown forms in their language. Even though creativity is most apparent when it comes to sentence formation, it is also manifest in our lexical knowledge, where new words are added to our mental lexicon regularly. There is, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages. These processes are clipping, acronymy, blending, back formation, derivation, borrowing, coinage, and compounding. The required processes here are clipping and derivation (affixation). Clipping is the word formation process which consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts. Examples are ad (advertise), doc (doctor), exam (examination), gas (gasoline), math S