Kurdish is spoken by approximately 33 million people across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. As part of the Indo-European family, Kurdish is written in different scripts depending on the dialect, with Kurmanji primarily using the Latin alphabet and Sorani employing a modified Perso-Arabic script. With an agglutinative structure and an SOV word order, Kurdish has a strong literary tradition, including epic poetry and historical chronicles. Despite historical suppression in some regions, Kurdish remains a key marker of cultural identity, with efforts to standardize and promote its use in education and media. (The Kurmanji/Northern Kurdish variety of Kurdish was used as a grammatical reference).
Stats
Language Family: Indo-European
Writing System: Latin, Perso-Arabic (Modified) (Sorani)
Writing System Type: Alphabet (Latin), Almost a complete alphabet (Perso-Arabic)
Writing Direction: L to R (Latin), R to L (Perso-Arabic)
Tones / Pitch Accent: None
Morphology: Agglutinative
Cases: None
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: None
Number of Verb Tenses: 5
Word Order: SOV
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 8
Number of Consonants: 40
Areas Where Spoken
Iran (~10%) (9 mil)
Iraq (~15%) (7 mil)
Syria (~9%) (2 mil)
Turkey (~17.6%) (15 mil)
Resources
Mass Resource List
Dictionary
Rebin Dictionary App: A Kurdish dictionary app
Textbooks
Website
kidpower.org: Articles, posters, handouts
digitaldialects.com: Learning games (sorani dialect)
Glossika Sorani: based on thousands of common sentences. The site will test you and place you in a level from A1 to C1. Usually you pay for these language courses, but since Glossika values language preservation, their website provides Sorani for free
Memrise: Community created courses
mylanguages.org: Vocab
My Nest in Kurdistan: A group blog about Kurdistan in general, with lists of reading references. Gives insight into Kurdish culture and history
A History of the Kurdish Language: History of Kurdish language and other cultural information
Kurdish Lessons: Features video lessons, written grammar guides, and one-on-one tutoring
Bibliotheque Numerique Kurde (Institut Kurde Paris): Online repository of Kurdish texts
kurdishairforce.blogspot: Basic Sorani phrases using Latin script instead of Arabic script
YouTube
Channels
kurd1: Independent Kurdish Satellite TV
Zarok TV: First and the only Kurdish satellite television station in the world broadcasting 24/7 for Kurdish Kids
Playlists
Videos