Joyce BLAU
Professor of Kurdish language and civilization
at the National Institute of Oriental Language and Civilization of the University of Paris


Kurdish is the language of more than twenty million Kurds living in a vast unbroken territory.

Kurdish belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and to the Irano-Aryan group of this family.

The Iranophone tribes and peoples of Central Asia and of the bordering territories begin moving towards the Iranian plateau and the littoral steppes of the Black sea at the turning point of the second and first millennium B.C.

As these tribes and peoples invade the area, they asimilate and give their language and their name to other Irano-aryan peoples already present on the land. Some refuse total assimilation. Even today there are fairly large pockets of non-Kurdophone Kurds living in Kurdistan of Turkey, of Iran of and of Iraq.

Kurdish, the language of the Kurds, which belongs to the north-westem group of Irano-Aryan languages has never had the opportunity to become unified and its dialects are generally separated into three groups with distinct similarities between them.

The biggest group, as regards the number of people who speak it, is the northern Kurdish, commonly called "Kurmanjî", spoken by the Kurds living in Turkey, Syria, the USSR and by some of the Kurd's living in Iran and Iraq. This language is also spoken by 200,000 Kurdophones settled around Kabul, in Afghanistan.

This group gave birth to a literary language.

The central group includes the Kurdish spoken in the north-east of Iraq, where it's called "Soranî" and the dialects of the neighbouring areas, beyond the Zagros, in Kurdistan of Iran. This group also gave birth to a literary language.