Sorani is the language of most Kurds in Iraq (4-6 million speakers) and Iran (5-6 million speakers).
Sorani is spoken by 7 to 9 million people, mostly in northern Iraq and western and northwestern Iran.
Sorani is a written standard of Central Kurdish developed in the 1920s (named after the historical Soran Emirate) and was later adopted as the standard orthography of Kurdish as an official language of Iraq.
Central Kurdish (کوردیی ناوەندی), also called Sorani (سۆرانی), is a Kurdish dialect or a language that is spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran.
It is spoken within a broad region that stretches roughly from Orūmīyeh, Iran, to the lower reaches of traditional Kurdistan in Iraq. It is usually written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, though Latin script is increasingly used. Southern Kurdish, also called Pehlewani, consists of a number of less-studied dialects.
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.
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.
Batman (Kurdish: Êlih) is a Kurdish-majority city in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey and the capital of Batman Province. It lies on a plateau, 540 meters (1,772 feet) above sea level, near the confluence of the Batman River and the Tigris.
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.) But being a Kurd does not necessarily mean alignment with a particular religious sect.
Modern genetic studies indicate that Iraqi Arabs and Iraqi Kurds are distantly related, though Iraqi Mesopotamian Arabs are more related to Iraqi-Assyrians than they are to Iraqi Kurds.
The Kurdish people are believed to be of heterogeneous origins combining a number of earlier tribal or ethnic groups including Lullubi, Guti, Cyrtians, Carduchi. Some of them have also absorbed some elements from Semitic, Turkic and Armenian people.
The Central Kurdish dialect, called Sorani, is spoken by Kurds in parts of Iraq and Iran.
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.
The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslim, with Alevi Shi'a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Yezidi communities. Religious divergences as well as varying political viewpoints account for a wide variety of Kurdish perspectives vis-à-vis the state, though political discourse is dominated by the Kurdish nationalist PKK.
Emirate of Kilis (Kurdish: Mîrektiya Kilîsê) was a Kurdish emirate which ruled the Kilis and Aleppo regions up until the disintegration of the Ayyubid dynasty in 1264.
Kurdish descended from Middle Persian, which in turn descended from Old Persian. It is closely related to Iranian languages descending from Middle Persian, such as Pashto, Baluchi, the minor dialect Tajik, and the extinct languages of Avestan and Sogdian.
Before Islam, the majority of Kurds followed a western Iranic pre-Zoroastrian faith which derived directly from Indo-Iranian tradition, some elements of this faith survived in Yezidism, Yarsanism and Kurdish Alevism. Kurds were a nation divided between the Byzantine and Persian Empires when Islam first appeared.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish heterodox group settled in the province of Mosul. They represent an interesting case study for the development of communalism in the heterogeneous social fabric of northern Iraq.
Iran (Rojhelat or Eastern Kurdistan)
The Kurdish region of Iran is a geographical area in western Iran that has been historically and is presently inhabited by a predominantly Kurdish population.
As told in Birth of the Demon, Ra's al Ghul (known only as The Physician prior to adopting the moniker) was born over 600 years before his first appearance in Batman comics, to a tribe of Chinese nomads settling in the desert in eastern North Africa, near a city governed by a Sultan.
Kurds are natives of the Middle East. They are part of the Iranian population. They inhabit the Kurdistan region which includes parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria; Arabs mainly live in the Arab world which includes Western Asia and North Africa.
The Kurdish–Turkish conflict is an armed conflict between the Republic of Turkey and various Kurdish insurgent groups who have either demanded separation from Turkey to create an independent Kurdistan, or attempted to secure autonomy and greater political and cultural rights for Kurds inside the Republic of Turkey.
The name Kurd can be dated with certainty to the time of the tribes' conversion to Islam in the 7th century ce. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, and among them are many who practice Sufism and other mystical sects.
Islamic Conquest
Arab-Muslim conquest of Kurdistan in 7th Century forced the Kurds to convert to Islam. [2] Battle of Jalawla in 632 played major role for Islamization of the region. People started to leave their ancient religions for Islam in fear of persecution.