Kurdish Language

Kurdish Language

Kurdish (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is a dialect continuum spoken by the Kurds in western Asia. It is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian group of Indo-European languages.

The Kurdish language is spoken by some 20 million people. According to the CIA World Factbook, 10% of the total population of Iran speaks Kurdish. The CIA factbook estimates the number to be between 25–30 million.

Kurdish is not a unified standard language but a discursive construct of languages spoken by ethnic Kurds, referring to a group of speech varieties that are not necessarily mutually intelligible unless there has been considerable prior contact between their speakers. The second official language of Iraq, referred to only as 'Kurdish' in political documents, is in fact an academic and standardized version of the Sorani dialect of a branch of languages spoken by Kurds.

The written literary output in Kurdic languages was confined mostly to poetry until the early 20th century, when a general written literature began to be developed. In its written form today "Kurdish" has two regional standards, namely Kurmanji in the northern parts of the geographical region of Kurdistan, and Sorani further east and south. Another distinct language group called Zaza–Gorani is also spoken by several million ethnic Kurds today and is generally also described and referred to as Kurdish, or as Kurdic languages, because of the ethnic association of the communities speaking the languages and dialects. Hewrami, a variation of Gorani, was an important literary language used by the Kurds but was steadily replaced by Sorani in the twentieth century.