Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish): linguistics

01Sounds

The language’s phonemes, from one published description.

02Pronunciation

Each letter with its usual sound.

Kurdish Latin alphabet (Hawar)

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 two genders, masculine and feminine, shown in the oblique case and the ezafe.
• Nouns and pronouns have a direct and an oblique case.
• Past tenses of transitive verbs are ergative: the subject takes the oblique case and the verb agrees with the object.
• The ezafe (-ê, -a, -ên) links a noun to the words that describe it.
• Prepositions often pair with a postposition, as in di … de.

To verify

Sources Thackston. Kurmanji Kurdish: A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings. (2006) To verify; Haig and Öpengin. Kurdish: A critical research overview. Kurdish Studies 2 (2). (2014) 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. Kurmanji Kurdish: A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings. 2006

   To verify

3. Haig and Öpengin. Kurdish: A critical research overview. Kurdish Studies 2 (2). 2014

   To verify

4. 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.

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

10. 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. Multi-CAST Northern Kurdish

   Geoffrey Haig, Maria Vollmer, Hanna Thiele · 2025 · Zenodo

   DatasetDataCiteZenodoOpen accessCC-BY-4.0

2. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) DoReCo dataset

   Geoff Haig, Hanna Thiele, Maria Vollmer · 2024 · NAKALA – https://nakala.fr (Huma-Num – CNRS)

   DatasetDataCiteOpen accessCC-BY-4.0

3. FLEURS-Kobani: Extending the FLEURS Dataset for Northern Kurdish

   Daban Q. Jaff, Mohammad Mohammadamini · 2026 · arXiv

   PreprintarXivOpen access

4. Percentage of Consonants Correct for 3-5 Years Old Kurdish-Speaking Children With Middle Kurmanji-Mukryani Dialect

   Shahla Fatemi Syadar, Talieh Zarifian, Yahya Modarresi et al. · 2018 · Iranian Rehabilitation Journal

   ArticleDOAJOpen access

5. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) DoReCo audiofiles

   Geoff Haig, Hanna Thiele, Maria Vollmer · 2024 · NAKALA – https://nakala.fr (Huma-Num – CNRS)

   OtherDataCiteOpen accessCC-BY-4.0

6. A Phonological Comparison of Khorasan and Northern Kurmanji

   2024 · Kurdiname

   ArticleOpenAIREOpen access

7. Northern Kurdish Of Khizava Text 7: §1-19

   Masoud Mohammadirad · 2022 · Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq

   ChapterCrossrefCC-BY-NC-4.0

8. Advancing Low-Resource Speech Recognition: A Comprehensive Study of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Northern Kurdish using Whisper Transformers

   Abdulla A, Tabibian S, Veisi H et al. · 2026 · Research Square

   PreprintEurope PMC

9. Dasinya: A dataset and preprocessing pipeline for the Badini Kurdish dialect.

   Saeed VA, Jacksi K · 2026 · Data Brief

   ArticleEurope PMCOpen access

10. End-to-End Transformer-based Automatic Speech Recognition for Northern Kurdish: A Pioneering Approach

    Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Shima Tabibian, Hadi Veisi et al. · 2024 · arXiv

    PreprintarXivOpen access

11. 2.3. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanjî)

    Geoffrey L.J. Haig · 2018 · De Gruyter eBooks

    ChapterOpenAlex

12. An Ecolinguistics Analysis on Lexicalization of Domestic Animals in Kurmanji Kurdish

    Elham Mizban, Shahla Sharifi, Atiyeh Kamyabi Gol · 2022 · مطالعات زبان‌‌ها و گویش‌های غرب ایران

    ArticleDOAJOpen access

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.