Southern Kurdish (Kelhurî, Feylî): linguistics

01Pronunciation

Each letter with its usual sound.

Southern Kurdish in the 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

02Grammar at a glance

• Word order is usually subject, object, verb.
• Unlike Kurmanji and Sorani, past tenses are not ergative.
• Nouns have no grammatical gender.

To verify

Sources Fattah. Les dialectes kurdes méridionaux. Acta Iranica 37. Peeters. (2000) To verify

03Core 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

04Sources

1. Fattah. Les dialectes kurdes méridionaux. Acta Iranica 37. Peeters. 2000

   To verify

2. 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.

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

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

   To verify

05Research 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. Approaches to Corpus Creation for Low-Resource Language Technology: the Case of Southern Kurdish and Laki

   Association for Computational Linguistics 2023, Sina Ahmadi, Antonios Anastasopoulos et al. · 2023 · Underline Science Inc.

   OtherDataCitearXivOpenAIREOpen accessCC-BY-4.0

2. A Cross-Dialect Account of Kurdish Past Tense Categories, with Special Reference to Southern Kurdish

   Sara Belelli · 2022 · Springer eBooks

   ChapterOpenAlexCrossrefOpenAIRE

3. Sara Belelli. “A Cross-Dialect Account of Kurdish Past Tense Categories, with Special Reference to Southern Kurdish”

   Shuan Osman Karim · 2023 · Abstracta Iranica

   ArticleCrossrefOpenAIREOpen accessCC-BY-SA-4.0

4. Towards a dialectology of Southern Kurdish : Where to begin?

   Sara Belelli · 2019 · Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics (BSKL)

   ChapterCrossrefOpenAIREOpen access

5. Observations on "ü" and "üe" Correspondences in Southern Kurdish

   X_name · 2026 · Zenodo

   PreprintDataCiteZenodoOpenAIREOpen accessCC-BY-4.0

6. Southern Kurdish film poster

   Yad Deen, Renas Babakir, Noori Issa · 2025 · The British Museum

   OtherDataCiteOpen accessCC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

7. On the Functions of (-ow) in Southern Kurdish

   Habib Gowhari, Forugh Asadi · 2022 · ̒Ilm-i Zabān

   ArticleDOAJOpen access

8. Southern Kurdish

   Parvaneh Rezaee · 2015 · ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa)

   ArticleOpenAlexOpen accessCC-BY-NC-SA

9. The Effect of Age and Level of Education as Extra-Linguistics Variables on Mutual Intelligibility between Central and Southern Kurdish Dialects

   Manijeh Mirmukri, Gholam-Hossein Karimi-Doostan · 2019 · پژوهشنامه ادبیات کردی

   ArticleDOAJOpen access

10. Glottolog 5.3 Resources for Southern Kurdish

    2026 · OLAC – Open Language Archives Community

    ArticleOpenAlexOpen accessCC-BY

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

    Saeed VA, Jacksi K · 2026 · Data Brief

    ArticleEurope PMCOpen access

12. II A Southern Kurdish Folksong in Kermanshahi Dialect

    E. B. Soane · 1909 · Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland

    ArticleOpenAlexZenodoOpen accessCC-ZERO

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