Kurdish Language5 min read

Background

The Kurdish language belongs to the Northwestern Iranic branch within the Indo-European languages family, spoken by more than 30 million people. People who speak the Kurdish language are called Kurds or Kurdish people (Ahmadi et al. 2019; Ahmadi 2020; Thackston 2006; Ashti Afrasyaw et al. 2021). The Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of their own; they live in homogeneous regions across four countries in the Middle East: Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran (Eppel 2016; Phillips 2017). Kurdish people refer to those regions altogether as Kurdistan.

The Kurdish people and their language have long suffered from targeted state violence, discrimination, and oppression in the aforementioned countries. This ongoing issue has hindered the development and standardization of the Kurdish language for over a century.
Unlike other Middle Eastern languages, such as Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Persian, which have thrived more freely, the Kurdish language has faced widespread suppression.
The impact of this oppression has been significant, and the Kurdish community continues to feel the consequences of this discrimination ( Harriet Allsopp et al. 2019; Bozarslan et al. 2021). As a result, the Kurdish language lacks behind in terms of resources, and it is considered an LRL since there is very modest progress in the field of Kurdish-NLP (Ahmadi et al. 2019; Ahmadi 2020).

However, the situation of the Kurds in Iraq has changed drastically since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the formation of the federal government of Iraq. The Kurdish region in northern Iraq is officially and internationally recognized as the Kurdistan region (KRG), where Kurdish is considered an official language.

Northern and Central Kurdish are the two major Kurdish dialects with the most speakers among Kurds worldwide (Ahmadi et al. 2019; Ahmadi 2020). The Kurdish language has ISO 639-3 kur language code and it is divided into the following four dialect groups (with corresponding ISO 639-3 language codes):

• Northern Kurdish or Kurmanji (kmr)
• Central Kurdish or Sorani (ckb)
• Southern Kurdish (sdh)
• Laki (lki)

On the one hand, the Northern Kurdish dialect is widely spoken in northern areas of Kurdistan (Syria and Turkey), the northern part of the KRG, and Armenia. It is written using a Latin-based (Hawar alphabet) script introduced by Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan in 1932. Northern Kurdish Latin-based script has 31 letters, eight vowels, and 23 consonants. 26 letters are from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; the remaining five letters come with a diacritic.

On the other hand, the Central Kurdish dialect is spoken in the southern and southeastern regions of Kurdistan (northern Iraq and western and northwestern Iran) and is generally written in a modified version of the Arabic-Persian script (read from right to left). Central Kurdish Arabic-based script has 27 consonants and seven vowels (Thackston 2006; Ahmadi et al. 2019; Ahmadi 2020; Matras 2019; Anonby 2022). Both alphabets are shown in the following two tables.

Table: Northern Kurdish Latin-based script (Hawar) with 23 consonants and 8 vowels.

Table: Central Kurdish Arabic-based script with 27 consonants and 7 vowels.

The following is an example of the same sentence in Northern and Central Kurdish, and English:
Parêzgarê Duhokê daxwaz ji encûmena wezîran dike Akrê bibe paytexta Newrozê.
پارێزگاری دهۆک داوا لە ئەنجوومەنی وەزیران دەکات ئاکرێ بکرێتە پایتەختی نەورۆز
`The governor of Duhok requests the council of ministers to make Akre the capital of Newroz.’

While Northern and Central Kurdish have the same word order, subject-object-verb (S-O-V), the differences between Northern Kurdish and Central Kurdish are not limited to their orthography. The differences extend to phonological and morphological levels as reported in (Ahmadi 2021; Thackston 2006; Thackston 2006; Esmaili et al. 2013).
In contrast to Central Kurdish, Northern Kurdish has the notion of gender (feminine and masculine) and case opposition (absolute and oblique) for nouns and pronouns. In addition, Northern Kurdish has the full ergative alignment in the past tense with transitive verbs, while Central Kurdish does not. Central Kurdish uses pronominal enclitics to achieve the same goal. Moreover, the passive voice (conjugated in all persons, moods, and tenses) in Northern Kurdish is constructed using the verb hatin `to come’ and dan `to give’ plus the infinitive, while in Central Kurdish, it is created using the verb morphology. ?? shows the linguistic properties of Northern and Central Kurdish.

Table: Linguistic properties of both Northern Kurdish and Central Kurdish.

Orthographic inconsistencies

Orthographic inconsistencies and standardization in the Kurdish language are particularly pronounced in the context of Northern Kurdish. The primary issue is the absence of a universally accepted, centralized orthographic system for all dialects \parencite{matras2022structural, ahmadi2020tokenization, gundougdu2019current}. Northern Kurdish lacks a standardized authority for its written form, making it more susceptible to regional variations and irregularities in spelling. As a result, there exists significant divergence in how words are written in different regions where the dialect is spoken.

However, efforts have been made to standardize Northern Kurdish and writing guidelines have been published throughout the years. The most recent books are Rêbera Rastnivîsînê (Aydo{u{g 2012; Weqfa 2019) and Rêzimana Kurmancî (Tan 2015). In this work, the grammars of Northern Kurdish discussed and the examples provided are derived from those books, unless stated otherwise.