Before you learn Kurdish, decide which Kurdish. Plenty of beginners find this out the hard way: they buy a book, open it, and discover it's written in an Arabic-based script while their Kurdish friends text in Latin letters, or the other way around. Kurdish is a group of closely related varieties rather than one standard language, and the two big ones are Kurmanji and Sorani.
The rule of thumb is simple. If the people you want to talk to come from Turkey, Syria or the Duhok region of Iraq, which covers most Kurdish families in Germany and much of the diaspora elsewhere in Europe, learn Kurmanji. If they come from Erbil, Sulaymaniyah or parts of western Iran, Sorani is more likely what they speak. Most of this guide is about Kurmanji: the alphabet, the grammar that surprises English speakers, a few first phrases and a plan for the first month.
Kurmanji or Sorani: an honest comparison
| Kurmanji | Sorani | |
|---|---|---|
| Also called | Northern Kurdish | Central Kurdish |
| Spoken mainly in | Turkey, Syria, the Duhok region of Iraq, northwest Iran, the Caucasus, the European diaspora | Iraqi Kurdistan around Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, western Iran |
| Usual script | Latin | Arabic-based |
| Grammatical gender | Masculine and feminine | None |
| Case endings | A direct and an oblique case | Largely gone |
| Saying "the" | No article; a bare noun usually reads as definite | An ending, -eke |
Speakers of the two can understand a fair amount of each other once they've had some exposure, but a beginner who learned one will struggle with the other. To complicate things, in Iraq's Duhok region Kurmanji is usually called Badini and is often written in the Arabic-based script, so learners there may eventually want both alphabets.
Nobody has a reliable count of Kurdish speakers, because census data is thin or politically sensitive in most of the countries involved. Estimates for all varieties together run from about 20 million to well over 30 million, and Kurmanji is generally considered the largest of them. It's also the variety Qlango teaches.
Is Kurdish hard to learn for English speakers?
Moderately, and in specific places. Kurdish is Indo-European, from the Iranian branch, which makes it a distant cousin of English. You can see it in nav (name), nû (new), du (two) and bira (brother). It's related to Persian too, but the two aren't mutually intelligible.
The Kurmanji alphabet has 31 Latin letters, and spelling is close to phonetic. Many letters work as they do in Turkish, which helps if you know Turkish. If you don't, these are the ones to watch:
- c is the "j" in "jam", and j is the "s" in "measure"
- ç is "ch", and ş is "sh"
- x is the "ch" in Scottish "loch", and q is a "k" made further back in the throat
- ê, î and û are long vowels, while i is short and light, much like the "i" in "bit"
Two pieces of grammar take real effort.
Gender you can't see. Mal (house) is feminine and nav (name) is masculine, but the nouns themselves don't show it. The linking ending does. When a noun is described or possessed, it takes an ending called the ezafe: mala min, "my house", but navê min, "my name". Likewise dayika min, "my mother", and bavê te, "your father". Get the ending wrong and you've changed the gender of the house.
The past tense flips. In the present, Kurmanji works roughly the way English does. In the past tense of verbs that take an object, it doesn't. Ez çûm means "I went", with ez for "I". But "I ate bread" is Min nan xwar: the "I" turns into min, and the verb agrees with the bread. Linguists call this ergativity. Learners call it other things.
