Metathesis Phonological Process in Kalhori Kurdish within Optimality Theory

M etathesis is one of the phonological processes that serves the phonotactic rules of the language to improve the phonological structures of the language. Marked structures are not regularly preferred in the languages, so, in trying to force the marked structures of the language toward nonmarkedness, phonotactic rules of the language also monitor all the structures that enter the language and change the dispreferred structures in accordance with the universal principles and especially languages parameter. This paper explained the diachronic performance of metathesis process in Kalhori Kurdish. Four different kinds of this process have been investigated, three of them have been explained based on the Optimality Theory approach, and the last one has been presented and described, but a thorough explanation will require more time and studies to the rareness of the samples of its occurrence and consequently poorness of the understanding and generalizations, which can be drawn from them.