Kurdish

About Kurdish

Kurdish is spoken by about 21 million people in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, and it is an official language of Iraq together with Arabic. It is a group of closely related varieties rather than one standard language. The two largest are Kurmanji, spoken mainly in Turkey and Syria, and Sorani, spoken mainly in Iraq and Iran, and speakers of the two do not always understand each other easily. Some guides here say which of the two a phrase comes from.

Kurmanji is usually written in a Latin alphabet close to Turkish, with letters such as ê, î and û. Sorani is written in an Arabic-based script that, unlike Arabic, shows every vowel. Hello is silav in Kurmanji and silaw in Sorani.

FamilyIndo-European, Iranian
Speakersabout 21 million (2007)
Official inIraq
ScriptLatin alphabet (Kurmanji), Arabic-based script (Sorani)
Codesku (ISO 639-1), kur (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Nationalencyklopedin (2007), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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