Sorani (Central Kurdish): linguistics

01Sounds

The language’s phonemes, from one published description.

02Pronunciation

Each letter with its usual sound.

Kurdish Arabic-based alphabet

Sound values are a teaching guide for the standard language, labelled to verify. Dialects differ. To verify

Sources Wikimedia Commons: pronunciation recordings, each under its own open licence. (2026) To verify

03Grammar at a glance

• Word order is usually subject, object, verb.
• Nouns have no grammatical gender and no case.
• The suffix -eke makes a noun definite, as in kitêbeke, the book.
• Pronoun clitics attach to words and mark the subject in the past tense of transitive verbs.
• The ezafe -î links a noun to the words that describe it.

To verify

Sources Thackston. Sorani Kurdish: A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings. (2006) To verify

04Core words compared

Ten everyday words across the languages of the region.

Persian, Kurdish, Zazaki and Balochi are Iranian languages, and many of their core words are related. Azerbaijani is Turkic and Armenian is its own branch of Indo-European, so their words differ. To verify

Sources Steingass. A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. Routledge and K. Paul. Digital edition: Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago. (1892) Verified; Chyet. Kurdish-English Dictionary. Yale University Press. (2003) To verify; Wahby and Edmonds. A Kurdish-English Dictionary. Clarendon Press. (1966) To verify; Paul. Zazaki: Grammatik und Versuch einer Dialektologie. Reichert. (1998) To verify; Jahani and Korn. Balochi. In Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian Languages. (2009) To verify; Johanson and Csató (eds.). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. (1998) To verify; Dum-Tragut. Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian. John Benjamins. (2009) To verify

05Sources

1. Moran and McCloy (eds.). PHOIBLE 2.0. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. 2019

   Verified CC BY-SA 3.0 Phoneme inventories, each from the published source it names, read 2026-10-23.

2. Thackston. Sorani Kurdish: A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings. 2006

   To verify

3. Steingass. A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. Routledge and K. Paul. Digital edition: Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago. 1892

   Verified Public domain. The digital edition was reachable on 2026-10-23.

4. Chyet. Kurdish-English Dictionary. Yale University Press. 2003

   To verify

5. Wahby and Edmonds. A Kurdish-English Dictionary. Clarendon Press. 1966

   To verify

6. Paul. Zazaki: Grammatik und Versuch einer Dialektologie. Reichert. 1998

   To verify

7. Jahani and Korn. Balochi. In Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian Languages. 2009

   To verify

8. Johanson and Csató (eds.). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. 1998

   To verify

9. Dum-Tragut. Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian. John Benjamins. 2009

   To verify

06Research and sources

Recent and relevant work on this page’s subject, from approved open scholarly sources. Metadata and links only. Titles stay as published. Not yet reviewed.

1. A Formal Description of Sorani Kurdish Morphology

   Sina Ahmadi · 2021 · arXiv

   PreprintarXivOpenAIREOpen access

2. Kurdish Sorani (Central Kurdish) Text Corpus

   Tarik A. Rashid, Qais kakl, Abdulhady Abdulla et al. · 2026 · Mendeley Data

   DatasetDataCiteOpen accessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

3. Mabast dataset for Sorani Kurdish dialect semantic text classification.

   Hasan IE, Al-Atroshi SJA · 2026 · Data Brief

   ArticleEurope PMCOpen access

4. Kurdish Poetry from the perspective of the criteria of textuality, Kurdish poetry texts of Central Kurdish dialect as an example

   Nawzad Waqas SAHID, Rebwar Muhammed ISMAIL · 2019 · International Journal of Kurdish Studies

   ArticleCrossref

5. Sorani Kurdish Read Speech Corpus for Rhythmic Analysis

   Akar Ahmed Saeed · 2026

   PreprintOpenAlexOpen accessCC-BY

6. Hunspell for Sorani Kurdish Spell Checking and Morphological Analysis

   Sina Ahmadi · 2021 · arXiv

   PreprintarXivOpen access

7. Discourse Particles in Sorani Kurdish

   Zanko RADNİA · 2022 · International Journal of Kurdish Studies

   ArticleCrossref

8. AsoSoft/Kurdish-G2P-dataset: Central Kurdish G2P dataset

   Aso Mahmudi · 2020 · Zenodo

   SoftwareZenodoOpen accessother-open

9. Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties

   Sina Ahmadi, Daban Q. Jaff, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam et al. · 2024 · arXiv

   PreprintarXivOpen access

10. Redefinition of Compounding in Sorani Kurdish Morphology: An Investigation on Nominal Compounds in Construction Morphology Approach

    kourosh karimi, Arezoo Najafian, Razieh Mahdi-Beyraghdar et al. · 2024 · مطالعات زبان‌‌ها و گویش‌های غرب ایران

    ArticleDOAJOpen access

11. Idiom Detection in Sorani Kurdish Texts

    Skala Kamaran Omer, Hossein Hassani · 2025 · arXiv (Cornell University)

    PreprintOpenAlexOpen accessCC-BY-NC-ND

12. Sorani Kurdish: The basics

    Faruk Akkuş, David Embick, Mohammed A. Salih · 2025 · Case and the Syntax of Argument Indexation

    ChapterCrossref

Sources, licences and fetch dates: arXiv (Metadata CC0 1.0; papers under their own licences), 2026-10-23; Crossref (Metadata facts, any use; abstracts may be publisher-owned and are never shown), 2026-10-23; DataCite (CC0 1.0 (DataCite metadata)), 2026-10-23; DOAJ (Metadata CC0 1.0 (DOAJ); articles under their own open licences), 2026-10-23; Europe PMC (Metadata reusable; full text under each article’s licence), 2026-10-23; OpenAIRE (CC BY 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph)), 2026-10-23; OpenAlex (CC0-1.0 data; metered API (free key)), 2026-10-23; Zenodo (Metadata CC0 1.0; each record under its own licence), 2026-10-23.