Kurdish (Kurmanji)

Where it’s spoken

Kurmanji (Kurdish: Kurmancî) is the most widely spoken Kurdish variety, used across southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (especially Duhok), and parts of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Lebanon. The Kurdish diaspora in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France numbers in the millions.

What it sounds like

Kurmanji has two genders (masculine and feminine), case markings on nouns and pronouns, ergative-absolutive alignment in past tenses, and a system of suffixes (izafe) that links nouns to their modifiers. Aspirated/unaspirated stop contrasts (p/p’, t/t’, k/k’) are phonemic in some varieties.

How it’s written

Kurmanji is primarily written in a Latin-based alphabet — the Hawar alphabet, developed in 1932 by Jaladat Bedirxan. Kurmanji-speaking communities in former Soviet states sometimes use Cyrillic, and in Syria and Iraq the Arabic script (Soranî’s script) is also used for Kurmanji.

History

Kurdish has been spoken in the historical region of Kurdistan for over a millennium. Modern Kurdish literature flourished in the 20th century, despite long periods of suppression — Turkey banned Kurdish broadcasting and publication until reforms beginning in 1991.