Kurdi

Introduction

Kurdistan Map Kurdish belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It consists of a continuum of languages/dialects spoken in Kurdistan, an area that covers northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. Kurds are also found in southwestern Armenia and an enclave in Azerbaijan. Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Province in Iran are officially acknowledged as parts of Kurdistan. Turkish and Syrian governments do not recognize their controlled parts of Kurdistan as a demographic or geographic region.

Mountain It is believed that the first Indo-European-speaking people started to migrate into present-day Kurdistan about 4,000 years ago. In the next two thousand years, the old language of the Kurds was completely displaced by Indo-European that eventually evolved into present-day Kurdish.

The status of Kurdish varies from country to country.

Iran
Kurdish is spoken as a home language. Most Iranian Kurds live in villages, the rest are nomadic. Kurdish is taught in schools in Kurdish areas. There are newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts in Kurdish. Most Kurdish speakers in Iran also speak Persian(Farsi) .
Iraq
In Kurdistan in Iraq, Kurdish has official regional status. Since 1919, it has been the medium of instruction in public schools. There is a newspaper and some publications in Kurdish, as well as TV and radio broadcasts. There has been an attempt to establish a literary language based on the dialect of Sulaimaniya, the capital of Kurdistan, and to purge it of Arabic loanwords.
Turkey
Kurdish las a long history of persecution in Turkey. It was banned in 1938 which led to a loss of literacy and growth of Kurdish-Turkish bilingualism. In 1961, with a new Turkish constitution, Kurdish publications began to appear but were frequently banned as soon as they came out. In 1967-1980 a series of laws were passed to repress the use of Kutdish. In 1991, the Turkish government legalized the use of Kurdish. In 2006, Turkey allowed private television channels to begin limited airing of Kurdish language programming, except for children's cartoons and educational programs that teach the Kurdish language.
Armenia
From the 1930's to the 1980's, Armenia's small community of resident Kurds were protected and provided with substantial state-sponsored cultural support. There was a Kurdish radio broadcast and a Kurdish newspaper. Dance and theatre groups flourished. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the situation changed dramatically, and the status ot the Kurdish minority has come under increasing threat.
Syria
Syria still opposes the use of Kurdish in the country.

Dialects

children holding lamp

kurds

The distinction between language and dialect within Kurdish is problematic and is based on a variety of criteria, not all of them linguistic. The Kurdish Academy of Language divides the Kurdish languages/dialects into three major groups that do not include a number of other languages/dialects thought to belong to the Kurdish continuum.

Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) is spoken by close to 4 million people in Turkey (Ethnologue), by 2.8 million in Iraq (Ethnologue), about 1 million speakers in Syria (Ethnologue), and by 100,000 in Armenia (Ethnologue). The number of speakersof Northern Kurdish worldwide is estimated at 9.1 million people (Ethnologue).
Central Kurdish (Sorani) is spoken by 460,000 people in Iraq and by 3.2 million people in Iran. There are also large displaced Central Kurdish communities in western Europe, USA, and various areas of the Middle East. The total number of people who speak Central Kurdish as their first language is estimated at 3.7 million (Ethnologue). The Central dialect emerged as the major literary form of Kurdish.
Southern Kurdish is spoken by 3 million people in Iran (Ethnologue).

According to Ethnologue, all three varieties are spoken in Iran: Central Kurdish (3.2 million), Southern Kurdish (3 million), Central Kurdish (350,000).

Click here to learn more about Kurdish dialects.

Structure

Sound System

Kurdish woman and child

woman

Kurdish man

Information about the phonology of Kurdish given below is based on the Central dialect.

Vowels

There are nine vowels: five are inherently long, and four are inherently short.
Long vowels are shortened when unstressed or at the end of words.
The rounded back vowel /ü/, similar to the second vowel in statue, is absent in other Iranian languages, and is the result of the influence of surrounding Turkic languages in which this vowel is common.
Click here to hear Kurdish vowels and see how they are represented in the Unified Kurdish Alphabet. .

Consonants
Below is a chart of the 26 consonant phonemes of Central Kurdish. The consonant /v/ is rarely used, and /q/ occurs primarily in Arabic loanwords.

..	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p - b	..	t - d	...	.	k - g	q	.
Fricatives	...	f - v	s - z	-	.	x		h
Affricates	...	....	.	t - d	.	.		.
Nasals	m	...	n	....	..			.
Lateral approximants	...	...	l	....	.			..
Trill	..	...	r	..	.	.		.
Flap (or tap)	..	..		.	.	.		.
Approximants (semi-vowels)	w	....	.	...	j	..		..

sound	approximate equivalent
	sh in shape
	s in treasure
t	ch in chat
d	j in John
	ng in song
	ll in ball
	in some pronunciations of tt in words like battle

Grammar

Kurdish children

Kurdish child

Kurdish band

Kurdish man

Like other Iranian languages, Kurdish is an inflected language, i.e., it adds prefixes and suffixes to roots to express grammatical relations and to form words.

Noun phrase

Nouns can be simple or compound.
Any unmodified noun in Kurdish may be generic, i.e., it can refer to one or more than one items. Plural is not obligatory when more than one item are implied.
There is no grammatical gender
Cases were lost except in Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish).
Definiteness is not formally marked.
Adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in number and case (the latter only in Kurmanji).
Personal pronouns are marked for number and person (1st, 2nd, 3rd). They can be free-standing or take the form of clitics. Free-standing forms are used for emphasis.

Verb phrase
Kurdish verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They have the following major characteristics:

Verbs have two stems: present and past.
Present stems can be simple or secondary.
Simple tenses are formed by the addition of personal endings to the two stems.
Secondary stems consist of a root + suffixes that indicate transitivity, intransitivity, and causality.
There are three tenses: present, past, and future.
There are two voices: active and passive.
There are two aspects: imperfective and perfective. Aspect is as important as tense.
There are four moods: indicative, conditional, imperative, and potential.
Past tense transitive sentences are formed as ergative constructions, i.e., transitive verbs in the past tense agree with the object rather than the subject of the sentence.

Word order
The normal word order in Kurdish is Subject-Object-Verb. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify.

Vocabulary

Kurdish child

Kurdistan Woman

Kurdish woman

Kurdish shares most of its vocabulary with other Iranian languages. Hoever, because Kurdish is spoken in five countries — Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia — the Kurds in each of these countries have come under different linguistic and cultural influences. For instance, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, who are products of an Arabic educational system, have incorporated Arabic vocabulary; Kurds in Turkey have borrowed words from Turkish; Kurds in Iran have assimilated Persian vocabulary; and Kurds in Armenia have borrowed words from Armenian and Russian. Most recently, English has become a source of borrowing, mainly in the areas of science, technology, politics, and the military.

Below are some basic Kurdish phrases and words written in the Unified Kurdish Alphabet. Acute accent represents vowel length, the letter 'c' represents the sound [ch] as in chap.

Roj bash	Good day
Sercawan	Good-bye
Tikaye	Please
Spas	Thank you
Bibúre	Sorry
Belé	Yes
Na	No
Mér(ik)	Man
Jin(ik)	Woman

Below are the numerals 1-10 written in the Unified Kurdish Alphabet.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
yak	dú	sé	cwár	pénj	shash	hawt	hasht	nó	da

Writing

For much of their history, the Kurdish literature was written in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, although Kurdish, written in the Perso-Arabic script, began to appear in writing in the 7th century A.D. At present, Kurdish is written in three different writing systems:

Perso-Arabic alphabet in Iran and Iraq
Latin alphabet in Turkey and Syria
Cyrillic alphabet in Armenia

Attempts are presently being made to create a standardized Unified Kurdish alphabet with a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. However, implementing a standardized literary language and orthography is a daunting task for a language spoken in five different countries.

A a	[a]	N n	[n]
B b	[b]	O o	[o]
C c	[ch]	P p	[p]
D d	[d]	R r	[r] flap
E e	[e] short	rr	[r] trill
É é	[e] long	S s	[s]
F f	[f]	Sh sh	[sh]
G g	[g] in gap	T t	[t]
H h	[h]	U u	[u] short
I i	[i] short	Ú ú	[u] long
Í í	[i] long	Ù ù	[ü] in statue
J j	[j]	V v	[v]
Jh jh	[zh] treasure	W w	[w]
K k	[k]	X x	[ch] in German Ich
L l	[l] in love	Y y	[y]
ll	[l] in ball	Z z	[z]
M m	[m]

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Kurdish.

Danezana Gerdúní ya Mafén Mirov
Bend 1
Hemú mirov azad ú di weqar ú mafan de wekhev tén dinyayé. Ew xwedí hish ú shuúr in ú divé li hember hev bi zihniyeteke bratiyé bilivin.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Kurdish word in English

Peshmerga

Kurdish guerilla freedom fighter, from pesh- 'before' + merga 'death' refers to those who face death.

Resources

Click here to find out where Kurdish is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Kurdish.

Online resources for the study of Kurdish language and culture
UCLA Language Profile for Kurdish
Yamada Linguistic Guide for Kurdish
Kurdish Academy of Language
Kurd_lal Archive of Resources for Kurdish Language
Kurdish Institute of Paris
Alphabet books for Kurdish children: Northern, Central, Southern