Kurdish (Kurmanji)

Kurmanji, also called Northern Kurdish, belongs to the Northwestern Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken in eastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq and parts of western Iran, with language use also extending into diaspora settings. The label identifies a particular part of the wider Kurdish linguistic landscape. It should not be used as a substitute name for every Kurdish variety, including Sorani, or as a promise that one learning resource will fit every community equally well.

What the Northern Kurdish label covers

Terminology varies among institutions. The Multi-CAST corpus description calls Northern Kurdish a language, while Indiana University’s overview presents Kurmanji as a Kurdish dialect group.

Linguist Yaron Matras discusses the conventional grouping of Kurmanji and Bahdini as Northern Kurdish, alongside Central Kurdish or Sorani. The distinction concerns grammar as well as vocabulary: his account identifies differences involving case marking and the organisation of grammatical gender. It also treats local and transitional varieties as evidence that broad group names do not exhaust the linguistic detail.

Such differences require investigation rather than assumptions drawn from state borders. Matras’s 2019 chapter reports research carried out from 2011 to 2017 for the Manchester dialect database. Trained speakers helped collect and transcribe questionnaires and recordings of spontaneous speech. The chapter explains limitations, including a sample weighted towards young, educated men and uneven regional access. Its geographical patterns are evidence about the material collected, not a complete inventory of every speaker’s usage. This makes the study useful both for its findings and for showing what a responsible dialect description must leave open.

A magazine and the making of a written standard

A significant episode in modern Kurmanji writing took place in Damascus. The New York Kurdish Cultural Center’s historical introduction to its Hawar archive identifies Celadet Alî Bedirxan as the magazine’s founding editor in 1932. The publication helped circulate and teach a Latin-based alphabet. Early issues included Kurmanji in both Latin and Arabic-Persian scripts before the magazine moved to Latin-script Kurmanji. Its concerns extended beyond spelling to literature, songs, customs and historical knowledge. Alphabet development was thus connected with creating material to read and discuss, not simply selecting new shapes for letters.

Terminology work continues through the Kurdish Institute of Paris. Its linguistic magazine Kurmancî, established in 1987, publishes results from seminars concerned with vocabulary and standardisation. The institute provides issues and multilingual indexes online. This gives readers a view of language development as collective discussion: local knowledge must be recorded, compared and made usable beyond the immediate setting in which a word is familiar.

The actual 2025 issue numbered 72 makes that process concrete. It contains regional word collections, multilingual equivalents and a section on food vocabulary from Bahdinan. Some entries identify different local forms rather than presenting a single undifferentiated list. Everyday subjects therefore belong inside serious language documentation. Names used when preparing food or describing a household task can preserve distinctions that a short general dictionary may not capture. The issue offers evidence of editorial work; it does not establish how frequently each item is used by present-day speakers.

Oral performance, new prose and recorded stories

Kurmanji literature also grows through changing relationships with oral storytelling. In a 2022 study, Joanna Bocheńska examines how Mehmed Uzun and Mehmet Dicle draw on the work of dengbêj performers. Their fiction does more than transfer a performance unchanged onto paper. Her comparison shows different ways of turning storytellers into narrators or characters and of reworking inherited material within modern prose. The resulting literature can honour a tradition while questioning how it has been represented.

Bocheńska also describes the practical difficulty of translating Dicle’s vocabulary: she worked with the author because some words drawn from regional speech, oral performance and literature were absent from available Kurmanji dictionaries. That detail connects literary creativity with lexicography. A dictionary records knowledge, but a writer’s choices can also expose what the dictionary has yet to document.

The Multi-CAST Northern Kurdish collection preserves another kind of evidence: traditional narratives recorded in Germany in the late 1990s and early 2000s from speakers who had grown up near Erzurum and Muš. Its documentation identifies transcription, translation and annotation as separate scholarly tasks. Those recordings also locate language history within migration. A story recorded far from its teller’s childhood home still carries local speech and narrative knowledge, while becoming part of a resource researchers can describe and compare.