A Genre Analysis of Kurdish Death Announcement Notices

Abstract

The present paper examines the genre of death announcement notices (DANs) in Kurdish. Those notices have been regularly used but never been subject to an academic investigation in the context of Kurdish language. This study aims at outlining the linguistic structure of DANs as well as the socio-cultural influences that contribute to their final composition. To illustrate the basic components of the notices, some 60 samples of women and men DANs or funeral posters, which were hanged in different locations such as mosques and major intersections of the research area were collected and analyzed using Swale’s (1990) genre move analysis. The analysis revealed three moves, namely, Signaling the Event, Identifying the Deceased and Funeral Arrangements as the obligatory components of the DANs in Kurdish. The notices were to some extent grounded in Islamic and Arabic traditions. Traces of gender bias were found in the corpus.