Sorani Kurdish — A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings: زمانى کورديى سۆرانى

by Wheeler M. Thackston

KURDISH BELONGS to the Western Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The two principal branches of modern literary Kurdish are (1) Kurmanji, the language of the vast majority of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the area designated by Kurdish nationalists as “North Kurdistan,” with an estimated fifteen to seventeen million speakers, and (2) Sorani, the language of most Kurds in Iraq (four to six million speakers) and Iran (five to six million speakers), the area desig- nated as “South Kurdistan.” Although the two are closely related, Kurmanji and Sorani are not mutually intelligible and differ at the basic structural level as well as in vocabulary and idiom. Since Kurdish is fairly closely related to and has been massively influenced by Persian, the dominant literary and cultural language of the area for the last millennium, Kurdish is best approached with a basic knowledge of Persian.

While Kurmanji is still far from being a unified, normalized, or standard- ized language, Sorani has been the second official language of Iraq since the creation of that country after World War I and has many decades of literary activity behind it. In Iran, Kurdish has never been accorded official status, but in Iranian Kurdistan there has been noteworthy publication in Kurdish, particularly after the Iranian revolution. The area in which Sorani is spoken in Iran is more or less the region designated as Kurdistan. Outside of that area, south to Kermanshah and east as far as Bijar, the language is known as Gorani, or South Sorani, which is a Mischsprache that is basically Persian in structure but Kurdish in vocabulary.

The readings, chosen to give samples of a broad range of prose writing ranging from fairy tales to the internet, are provided with running glosses beneath the texts, and the glosses in the readings are also contained in the Kurdish–English vocabulary at the end of the book.

250 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2022

About the author

Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (born 1944) is an Orientalist and distinguished editor and translator of numerous Chaghatai, Arabic and Persian literary and historical sources.
Thackston is a graduate of Princeton's Oriental Studies department, where he was a member of Princeton's Colonial Club, and Harvard's Near Eastern Studies department (Ph.D., 1974), where he was Professor of the Practice of Persian and other Near Eastern Languages since 1972. He studied at Princeton under Martin Dickson and at Harvard with Annemarie Schimmel. Thackston retired from teaching at Harvard in 2007.