Kurdish Language Services

Kurdish is a dialect continuum spoken by the Kurds in western Asia. Genealogically, it is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European languages. It has between 16 and 35 million speakers today. It exists in a continuum of dialects spoken in a geographic area spanning Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and a small number of speakers in the South Caucasus. There does not exist any single Kurdish language per se. What exists is the concept, a discursive construct of such a language that at best refers to a group of speech varieties which are not mutually intelligible unless there has been considerable prior contact between their speakers. 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 millions of 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. Writing system > The Kurdish language is written using four different writing systems. In Iran and Iraq it is written using an Arabic alphabet, composed by Sa’id Kaban Sedqi. More recently, it is sometimes written with a Latin alphabet in Iraqi Kurdistan. In Turkey, Syria and Armenia, it is written using a Latin alphabet. There is a proposal for a unified international recognized Kurdish alphabet based on ISO-8859-1 called Yekgirtú. Kurdish in the former USSR is written with a Cyrillic alphabet. Kurdish has even been written in the Armenian alphabet in Soviet Armenia and in the Ottoman Empire (a translation of the Gospels in 1857 and of all New Testament in 1872). Current status > Today, Kurdish is an official language in Iraq. In Syria, on the other hand, publishing material in Kurdish is forbidden. Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media. The Kurdish alphabet is not recognized in Turkey, and the use of Kurdish names containing the letters X, W, and Q, which do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, is not allowed. In 2012 Kurdish-language lessons became an elective subject in public schools; previously, Kurdish education had only been possible in private institutions. In Iran, though it is used in some local media and newspapers, it is not used in public schools.