Kurdish

Is Kurdish one language or several

The answer depends on who is asked. Kurmanji, Sorani and Southern Kurdish form a dialect continuum with some mutually unintelligible varieties, and a Kurmanji speaker does not find it easy to talk with people in Sulaymaniyah or Halabja. Philip G. Kreyenbroek, writing in 1992, found Kurmanji and Sorani as far apart in grammar as English and German: Sorani has no gender or case endings, and Kurmanji has both. They are called dialects of one language for their common origin and for the sense of Kurdish unity the label carries. Zaza and Gorani, spoken by several million people who identify as Kurds, are not classed as Kurdish at all.

Where Kurdish sits among Iranian languages

It is generally placed in the Northwestern Iranian group, though some scholars put it between the northwestern and southwestern branches. Ludwig Paul argues for a northwestern origin, with traits shared with Persian through long contact. Vladimir Minorsky traced it to Median; Windfuhr called its dialects Parthian with a Median substratum.

What the earliest Kurdish texts were

Ibn Wahshiyya translated two Kurdish books on farming into Arabic in the early 9th century. The Cambridge History of the Kurds names a short 15th-century Christian prayer, written in Armenian letters, as the first proper text in Kurdish. Classical poets such as Ahmad Khani and Malaye Jaziri built a literary language between the 15th and 17th centuries, and Kurdish writing stayed mostly poetry until the early 20th. The Italian priest Maurizio Garzoni published the first Kurdish grammar in Rome in 1787.

When Turkey lifted its bans

Kurdish was illegal in Turkey from the 1980 coup until 1991, and education and broadcasting in it were banned until August 2002. Private television channels were allowed to air Kurdish from March 2006, and the state broadcaster TRT opened a 24-hour Kurdish channel on 1 January 2009. Names containing x, w and q, letters missing from the Turkish alphabet, were not permitted before 2013, and Kurdish became an elective school subject in 2012. In Iran it appears in some local media but not in public schools.