Kurd

Kurdish people
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Kurd redirects here. For the 1848–1910 German author, see Kurd Lasswitz.
Kurds/Kurdi
1st row: Saladin • Sherefxan Bidlisi • Ehmedê Xanî • Nezami Ganjavi
2nd row: Mustafa Barzani • Massoud Barzani • Jalal Talabani • Leyla Zana
3rd row: Ahmet Kaya • Şivan Perwer • Rahim Moeini Kermanshahi • Seyhmus Dagtekin
4th row: Feleknas Uca • Bahman Ghobadi • Azad Azadpour • Darin Zanyar


Total population
23 to 36 million
Regions with significant populations
Asia
Turkey 11.4 to 17.5 million [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
Iran 6.5 to 7 million [8][7]
Iraq 6 to 6.5 million [9][7]
Syria 2 million [10]

Afghanistan 200,000 [11]
Azerbaijan 150,000 [11]
Israel 100,000 [12]
Russia 100,000 [13]
Armenia 45,000 [11]
Europe
Germany 500,000 to 800,000 [11][13]
Sweden 50,000 to 60,000 [14]
France 50,000 [15]

Languages
Kurdish
In its different forms: Sorani, Zazaki, Kurmanji , and Fayli Southern dialects

Religion
Predominantly Sunni Muslim
also some Shia, Yazidism, Yarsan, Judaism, Christianity

Related ethnic groups
other Iranian peoples
(Talysh • Baluch • Gilak • Lurs • Persians)


The Kurds (Kurdish: کورد / Kurd) are an Ethnic-Iranian ethnolinguistic group mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Substantial Kurdish communities also exist in the cities of western Turkey, and they can also be found in Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Russia, Lebanon and, in recent decades, some European countries and the United States (see Kurdish diaspora). Most speak Kurdish, an Indo-European language of the Iranian branch. The Kurds are classified as an Iranian people.[16][17][18][19][20][21]
Language
Main article: Kurdish languages
"Kurdish" is not a firm and standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language. Kurdish is a continuum of closely related dialects that are spoken in a large geographic area spanning several national states, in some of these states forming one, or several, regional substandards (e.g., Kurmanji in Turkey; Sorani in northern Iraq).[22]

Today the term Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is a term used for several Iranian languages spoken by Kurds. It is mainly concentrated in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.[23]

The Kurdish languages belong to the north-western sub-group of the Iranian languages, which in turn belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The older Hurrian language of the people inhabiting the Kurdish areas was replaced by Indo-European around 850 BCE, with the arrival of the Medes to Western Iran.[24]

Most Kurds are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the languages of the surrounding peoples such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a second language. Kurdish Jews and some Kurdish Christians (not be confused with ethnic Assyrians of Kurdistan) usually speak Aramaic (for example: Lishana Deni) as their first language. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic rather than Kurdish.

The classification of Kurdish dialects is not an easy task, however the most commonly accepted classification is that of the late Prof. D. N. Mackenzie[25]. According to Mackenzie, there are few linguistic features that all Kurdish dialects have in common and that are not at the same time found in other Iranian languages[26].

The Kurdish dialects according to Mackenzie are classified as[25]:

Northern group (The Kurmanji dialect group.)
Central group (Part of the Sorani dialect group)
Southern group (Part of the Sorani dialect group) including Kermanshahi, Ardalani and Laki language
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, The Kurdish language has two main groups:[27]

The Kurmanji dialect group.
The Sorani dialect group.
and several sub-dialects:

Kermanshahi/Feyli
Laki language
Gorani language
Although specialized sources consider Zaza-Gorani [25][28][29][16] to be separate languages which share a large number of words with Kurdish , the general term Kurd has, nevertheless, historically been used to designate also these groups.

Commenting on the differences between the "dialects" of Kurdish, Kreyenbroek clarifies that in some ways, Kurmanji and Sorani are as different from each other as English and German, giving the example that Kurmanji has grammatical gender and case-endings, but Sorani does not, and observing that referring to Sorani and Kurmanji as "dialects" of one language is supported only by "their common origin...and the fact that this usage reflects the sense of ethnic identity and unity of the Kurds."[30]