Kurdish (Kurdish:
Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by
Kurds in
western Asia. Unlike many other languages it does not have a single
standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language. On the contrary, it is a continuum of closely related dialects that are spoken in a large geographic area spanning several national states, in some of these states forming one, or several, regional substandards (e.g.,
Kurmanji in Turkey;
Sorani in northern Iraq).
Today the term Kurdish language is a term used for several languages spoken by
Kurds. It is concentrated mainly in parts of
Iran,
Iraq,
Syria and
Turkey.
The Kurdish languages belong to the northwestern sub-group of
Iranian languages, which themselves belong to the
Indo-Iranian branch of the
Indo-European language family. The languages related to Kurdish are
Balochi,
Gileki and
Talysh, all of which belong to the north-western branch of Iranian languages. There are also transitional dialects between Southern Kurdish and the
Lori and Bakhtiari dialects which are in the south-western branch of Iranian.
Origin and roots
The Kurdish language belongs to the
Indo-European family. The older
Hurrian language of the people inhabiting the Kurdish areas was replaced by Indo-European around 850 BCE, with the arrival of the Medes to Western Iran
A linguistic group influential on Kurdish to a lesser degree was
Aramaic.
History
Although Kurdish has a long history, little is known about Kurdish in pre-Islamic times. Among the earliest Kurdish religious texts is the
Mashafa Rash/Mishefa Reş (The Black Book) the sacred book of
Yazidi faith. It is considered to have been authored by
Hassan bin Adi (b. 1400 AD), the great-grandnephew of the founder of the faith (Shiekh Adi), sometime in the 13th century AD. It contains the Yazidi account of the creation of the world, the origin of man, the story of
Adam and
Eve and the major prohibitions of the faith. From the 15th to 17th centuries, classical Kurdish poets and writers developed a literary language. The most famous classical Kurdish poets from this period were Ali Hariri,
Ahmad Khani,
Malaye Jaziri and
Faqi Tayran.
The
Italian priest Maurizio Garzoni published the first Kurdish grammar titled
Grammatica e Vocabolario della Lingua Kurda in
Rome in
1787 after eighteen years of missionary work among the Kurds of
Amadiyah.
This work is very important in Kurdish history as it is the first acknowledgment of the originality of the Kurdish language on a scientific base. Garzoni was given the title
Father of Kurdology by later scholars. The Kurdish language was banned in a large portion of Kurdistan for some time. After the
1980 Turkish coup until 1991 the use of the Kurdish language was illegal in Turkey.
Current status
Today, Kurdish is an official language in
Iraq, while it is banned in
Syria, where it is forbidden to publish material in Kurdish.
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 still 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. Kurdish education in private institutions is allowed in Turkey, but there has been little demand for these courses.
In
Iran, though it is used in some local media and newspapers, it is not used in schools
. In 2005, 80 Iranian Kurds took part in an experiment and gained scholarships to study in Kurdish in
Iraqi Kurdistan .
In March 2006, Turkey allowed private television channels to begin airingprogramming in the Kurdish language. However, the Turkish government said that they must avoid showing children's
cartoons, or educational programs that teach the Kurdish language, and could broadcast only for 45 minutes a day or four hours a week. However, most of these restrictions on private Kurdish television channels were relaxed in September 2009.
The state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) started its
24-hour Kurdish television station on 1 January 2009 with the motto “we live under the same sky.” The Turkish Prime Minister sent a video message in Kurdish to the opening ceremony, which was attended by Minister of Culture and other state officials. The channel uses the controversial
X,
W,
Q letters during broadcasting.
Other
Kurdish satellite televisions are available in the Middle East and Europe.
Kurdish blogs have emerged in recent years as virtual fora where Kurdish-speaking Internet users can express themselves in their native Kurdish or in other languages.
Dialects
Kurdish has two standardized dialects: a northern and a central one. The northern dialect,
Northern Kurmanji also commonly referred to simply as
Kurmanji, is spoken in the northern half of Iraqi Kurdistan, Caucasus, Anatolia and Syria. The central dialect, called
Sorani, is spoken in west Iran and much of Iraqi Kurdistan..
Kurmanji and Sorani
Kurmanji or
Northern Kurdish is more archaic than the other dialects in both phonetic and morphological structure. It is conjectured that the differences between central and northern dialects has been caused by the proximity of the central group to other Iranian languages.
[D.N. MacKenzie, Language in Kurds & Kurdistan, Encyclopaedia of Islam.].
According to Philip Kreyenbroek (1992), it also may be misleading to call
Kurmanji (
Northern Kurdish) and
Sorani "dialects" because they are in some ways as different from one another as German and English.
According to
Encyclopaedia of Islam, although Kurdish is not a unified language, its many dialects are interrelated and at the same time distinguishable from other western Iranian languages. The same source classifies different Kurdish dialects as two main groups, northern and central.
. The reality is that the average Kurmanji speaker does not find it easy to communicate with the inhabitants of
Suleymania or
Halabja.
Sorani differs on six grammatical points from Kurmanji. This appears to be a result of
Gorani (Haurami) influence,
- The passive conjugation: the Sorani passive morpheme -r-/-ra - corresponds to -y-/-ya - in Gorani and Zaza, while Kurmanji employs the auxiliary hatin, come;
- a definite suffix -eke, also occurring in Zazaki;
- an intensifying postverb -ewe, corresponding to Kurmanji preverbal ve-;
- an 'open compound' construction with a suffix -e, for definite noun phrases with anepithet;
- the preservation of enclitic personal pronouns, which have disappeared in Kurmanji and in Zaza;
Gorani, which in medieval ages was the literary idiom of modern Sorani-speaking areas, eventually was replaced by Sorani.
Kurdish not an endo-linguonym
The use of the word "Kurdish" to describe the language or languages that Kurds speak may be the very cause of controversies regarding the differences among the dialects or languages. Outside of foreign conversation or literature, the majority of Kurds use the name of the dialect they speak in order to describe their dialect or language, and sometimes even one another. The use of the word,
Kurdish, by contrast, has been used more often to simply describe the ethnic identity of the Kurds, reflecting the significant differences between the dialects or languages.
Some linguistic scholars assert that the term "Kurdish" has been applied extrinsically in describing the language the Kurds speak, while Kurds intuitively have used the word to simply describe their ethnic or national identity and refer to their language as
Kurmanji,
Sorani,
Hewrami, or whatever other dialect or language to which they are native. Some historians have noted that it is only recently that the Kurds who speak the
Sorani dialect have begun referring to their language as
Kurdî, in addition to their identity, which is translated to simply mean Kurdish.
Phonology
According to the Kurdish Academy of Language, Kurdish has the following phonemes:
Consonants
- Just as in many English dialects, the velarised lateral does not appear in the onset of a syllable. Additionally, in some dialects, the velarised lateral changes to a in women's speech.
- and are strongly palatalised before the high and mid front vowels ( and ) as well as the rounded high front allophone of the phoneme , closing on and .
Vowels
As in most modern Iranian languages, Kurdish vowels contrast in quality; they often carry a secondary length distinction that does not affect syllabic weight. This distinction appears in the writing systems developed for Kurdish. The three "short" vowels are , and and the five long vowels are , , , and .
Historical phonology
Indo-European linguistic comparison
Because the Kurdish language is an
Indo-European language, there are many words that are
cognates in Kurdish and other Indo-European languages such as
Avestan,
Persian,
Sanskrit,
German,
English,
Norwegian,
Latin and
Greek. (Source:
Altiranisches Wörterbuch (1904) for the first two and last six.)
Vocabulary
The bulk of the vocabulary in standard Kurdish is of
Iranian origin, especially of northwestern Iranian; there are also
Persian (southwestern) loanwords in Kurdish, entered mainly through poetry. A smaller number of loanwords come from
Semitic, mainly
Arabic, which are mostly religious terms. Yet, a smaller group of loanwords which are of
Armenian,
Caucasian and
Turkic origins are used in standard Kurdish, besides some European words. There are also Kurdish words with no clear etymology.
Writing system
The Kurdish language uses three different writing systems. In Iran and Iraq it is written using a
modified version of the Arabic alphabet (and more recently, sometimes with the
Latin alphabet in Iraqi Kurdistan). In Turkey and Syria, it is written
using the Latin alphabet. As an example, see the following online news portal published in
Iraqi Kurdistan. Also see the
VOA News site in Kurdish. Kurdish in the former USSR is written with a modified
Cyrillic alphabet. There is also a proposal for a unified international recognised Kurdish alphabet based on
ISO-8859-1 called
Yekgirtú.
Dictionaries
Kurdish-only dictionaries
- Khal, Sheikh Muhammad, Ferhengî Xal (Khal Dictionary), Kamarani Press, Sulaymaniya, 3 Volumes,
Vol. I, 1960, 380 p.
Vol. II, 1964, 388 p.
Vol. III, 1976, 511 p.
Kurdish-English dictionaries
- Chyet, Michael L., Kurdish Dictionary: Kurmanji-English, Yale Language Series, U.S., 2003 (896 pages) (see )
- Abdullah, S. and Alam, K., English-Kurdish (Sorani) and Kurdish (Sorani)-English Dictionary, Star Publications / Languages of the World Publications, India, 2004
- Awde, Nicholas, Kurdish-English/English-Kurdish Dictionary and Phrasebook, Hippocrene Books Inc., U.S., 2004
- Raman : English-Kurdish (Sorani) Dictionary, Pen Press Publishers Ltd, UK, 2003, (800 pages)
- Saadallah, Salah, English-Kurdish Dictionary, Avesta/Paris Kurdish Institute, Istanbul, 2000, (1477 pages)
- Amindarov, Aziz, Kurdish-English/English-Kurdish Dictionary, Hippocrene Books Inc., U.S., 1994
- Rizgar, Baran (M. F. Onen), Kurdish-English/English-Kurdish (Kurmancî Dictionary) UK, 1993, 400 p. + 70 illustrations
As a main program,
Iranian Kurdish-speaker scholar
Hamid Hassani is supposed to be preparing a
Soranî Kurdish Language Corpus, consisting of one million words.
See also
- La Marle's site about Western Indo-Iranian languages and Minoan Crete, through Linear A script.
