There are two main Kurdish dialects (Kurmanji and
Today, the two principal written Kurdish dialects are Kurmanji and Sorani. Sorani is, along with Arabic, one of the two official languages of Iraq and is in political documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".
The two people also speak different languages. The Kurds speak in Kurdish while Persians speak Farsi, the dominant language in Iran.
Language. The majority of people who identify as Kurds speak Kurmanji, meanwhile a minority of them speak Turkish or Zazaki as their mother language.
According to the Article 4 of the Constitution, Arabic and Kurdish are the official languages of Iraq, while three other languages: Turkish, Syriac and Armenian, are recognized as minority languages.
Many people may not know this, but these languages all belong to different language families. In fact, Persian and Kurdish are Indo-European languages and have more in common with English and Greek than they do with Arabic.
Both of them share highly similar origins with regard to social relationships and linguistic affinities. Basically both languages were utilized by Aryan community and they are categorized as Iranian and Zagros family languages. Kurdish and Farsi languages were spoken by both Aryan race people as their homelands.
Kurds (Kurdish: کورد, Kurd) or Kurdish people are an Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria.
Kurds are an Iranian people; the first known Indo-Iranians in the region were the Mitanni, who established a kingdom in northern Syria five centuries after the fall of Gutium. The Mitanni are believed to have spoken an Indo-Aryan language, or perhaps a pre-split Indo-Iranian language.
An individual‐level analysis shows that most Turkish–Kurdish intermarriage takes place between Kurdish males and Turkish females and that both Turks and Kurds intermarry more in the large cities and in regions where their own group is small.
Religion. The two major religions among Kurds in Iran are Islam and Yarsanism, while fewer Kurds adhere to Baháʼí Faith and Judaism.
Nearly all Iraqi Kurds consider themselves Sunni Muslims. In our survey, 98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias. (A small minority of Iraqi Kurds, including Yazidis, are not Muslims.)
The region was declared a closed military area from which foreigners were banned between 1925 and 1965. In an attempt to deny their existence, the Turkish government categorized Kurds as "Mountain Turks" until 1991. The words "Kurds", "Kurdistan", or "Kurdish" were officially banned by the Turkish government.
Kurds in Lebanon are people born in or residing in Lebanon who are of full or partial Kurdish origin. Estimates on the number of Kurds in Lebanon prior to 1985 were around 60,000. Today, there are tens of thousands of Kurds in Lebanon, mainly in Beirut.
Learning Kurdish can be hard in terms of grammar and learning resources, especially if you don't speak any middle-eastern language. The Kurmanji dialect can be easier for speakers of European languages because it uses the Latin alphabet, while the Sorani dialect uses the Arabic script.
Belonging to different language families, the Kurdish and Turkish languages have distinctive linguistic features. While Turkish belongs to the Uralic–Altaic language family, Kurdish is grouped among the western Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European fam- ily.
No, Kurds are Arab. They are a separate linguistic and ethnic group. Arabic is a Semitic language, while Kurdish is an Indo-European language. However, like Arabs, most Kurds are Sunni Muslims.
From politicians and activists, to entrepreneurs and musicians, a range of well-known figures hail from the Kurdistan region. From creating the world's leading Greek yogurt brand to heroically protecting the rights of Kurdish people, prominent Kurdish figures have deeply impacted every society they've touched.
Where do they come from? The Kurds are one of the indigenous peoples of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia.
Kurds have had a long history of discrimination perpetrated against them by the Turkish government. Massacres have periodically occurred against the Kurds since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
Among the major settlements with Kurdish communities in Palestine are city of Hebron (al-Khalil), Jerusalem (al-Quds) and Shechem (Nablus). There are also many Kurdish clans who came to Palestine at post-Ayyubid periods, especially under the Ottomans. The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in the West Bank.
Zoroastrianism was one of the dominant religions in Kurdistan before the Islamic era. Currently, Zoroastrianism is an officially recognized religion in Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran and three Zoroastrian temples have opened in Iraqi Kurdistan after the official recognition of Zoroastrianism in the region in 2015.
Sorani and Kurmanji account for more than 75 percent of native Kurdish speakers. Sorani is written in Arabic-based script and Kurmanji in a Latin-based script. Although the two languages are closely related, Kurmanji and Sorani are not mutually intelligible in either written or spoken form.
Most probably, Kurd people gene pool majority may be composed of an admixture of North Mesopotamian (Caucasus) and Near East peoples; Central Asia gene input is not discarded [5,9,10,11,12,13]. Kurds have mainly been defined by their ancestry, language and cultural uses.
Kurdish, in general, is divided into three dialect groups, known as Northern Kurdish (or Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (or Sorani), and Southern Kurdish.