Professor Joyce Blau, to whom this article is dedicated in friendship and admiration, is one of the few scholars to have worked on the rich literature of the Eastern Kurds in a language widely referred to as ‘Gurani’. Following a usage that has become more or less established, in a publication on the subject, Joyce speaks of Gurani as a ‘literary koinè’. The term ‘Gurani’ or ‘Gorani’ is used to denote a number of different phenomena. It used as a collective term for a group of dialects spoken in the Hawrāmān and Gurān regions; it is in this sense that Joyce used the term in her publication ‘Gourani et Zaza’ (Blau 1989).When used in this way, however, ‘Gurani’ comprises two groups of living dialects ,viz. those of Hawrāmān and Gurān, which show marked differences from one another. Although the Gurani dialects are not as well documented as Hawrami, several spoken forms have been described at least to some extent. Besides those ‘natural’, spoken forms of ‘Gurani’, the term is also used for another form of speech which is used for literary purposes, and which is often described as a koinè.
