Language
Iraq's national languages are Arabic and Kurdish. Arabic is spoken as a first language by around 79 percent of Iraqi people, and Kurdish by around 17 percent. The two main regional dialects of Arabic spoken by the Iraqi people are Mesopotamian Arabic (spoken in the Babylonian alluvial plain and Middle Euphrates valley) and North Mesopotamian Arabic (spoken in the Assyrian highlands). The two main dialects of Kurdish spoken by Kurdish Iraqis are Soranî (spoken in the provinces of Arbil and Sulaymaniyah) and Kurmanji (spoken in the province of Dohuk). In addition to Arabic, most Christian Iraqis and some Mandaean Iraqis speak Neo-Aramaic dialects, and around 1 percent of Iraqi people speak Persian and Turkmen respectively.
Iraqi Arabic has an Aramaic substratum, and retains a number of words of Akkadian provenance.
The vast majority of Kurdish and Aramaic–speaking Iraqis also speak Iraqi Arabic.
Read more about this topic: Iraqi People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.”
—Louise Bogan (1897–1970)