The name Goran appears to be of Indo-Iranian origin. The name may be derived from the old Avestan word, gairi, which means mountain.
Literature
Under the independent rulers of Ardalan, with their capital latterly at Sanandaj, Gorani became the vehicle of a considerable corpus of poetry. Gorani was and remains the first language of the scriptures of the Ahl-e Haqq sect, or Yarsanism, centered on Gahvara. Prose works, in contrast, are hardly known. The structure of Gorani verse is very simple and monotonous. It consists almost entirely of stanzas of two rhyming half-verses of ten syllables each, with no regard to the quantity of syllables. Names of forty classical poets writing in Gurani are known, but the details of the lives and dates are unknown for the most part. Perhaps the earliest writer is Mala Parisha, author of a masnavi of 500 lines on the Shi'ite faith who is reported to have lived around 1398–99. Other poets are known from the 17th–19th centuries and include Mahzuni, Shaikh Mostafa Takhti, Khana Qubadi, Yusuf Zaka, and Ahmab Beg Komashi. One of the last great poets to complete a book of poems in Gurani is Mala Abd-al Rahm of Tawa-Goz south of Halabja. There exist also a dozen or more long epic or romantic masnavis, mostly translated by anonymous writers from Persian literature including: Bijan and Manijeh, Khurshid-i Khawar, Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad, Haft Khwan-i Rostam and Sultan Jumjuma. Manuscripts of these works are currently preserved in the national libraries of Berlin, London, and Paris.
Dialects
Bajelani
Bajelani is a Gorani dialect with about 59,000 speakers, predominately around Mosul, near Khanaqin and near the Khosar valley.
Hawrami
Hawrami also known as Avromani, Awromani or Horami, is a Gorani dialect and is regarded as the most archaic one. It is mostly spoken in the Hawraman region, a mountainous region located in western Iran and northeastern Iraq. There are around 23,000 speakers, and it was classed as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO in 2010. Due to concerns with the decline of Hawrami speakers, as people move away from the Hawraman region to cities like Erbil, Jamal Habibullah Faraj Bedar, a retired teacher from Tawela, decided to translate the Qur'an from Arabic into Hawrami. The translation took two and a half months and 1000 copies of the publication were printed in Tehran.
Sarli
Sarli is spoken in northern Iraq by a cluster of villages north of the Little Zab river, on the confluence of the Khazir River and the Great Zab river, just west-northwest of the city ofKirkuk. Many speakers have been displaced by conflicts in the region. It is reportedly is most similar to Bajelani but is also similar to Shabaki. It contains Kurdish, Turkish and Persian influences, like its neighbours Bajelani and Shabaki.
Shabak
Phonology
Consonants
All voiceless plosives and affricates are aspirated.
A glottal stop may be heard before a word-initial vowel, but is not phonemic.
Sounds /ʕ ʁ/ only occur in loanwords.
/x/ can also be heard as among different dialects.
/q/ can also be aspirated as .
The voiced /d/ may be lenited in post-vocal positions, and occur as a voiced dental approximant . In the Nawsud dialects, /d/ can be heard as an alveolar approximant sound , and may also be devoiced when occurring in word-final positions as .
In the Nawsud and Nodša dialects, a word-initial /w/ can be heard as a or a labialized .
