Kurdish

Kurdish (Kurdî) is an Indo-European Iranian language family with ~30M speakers spread across the historical region of Kurdistan, divided among Turkey (~15M), Iraq (~7M), Iran (~7M), and Syria (~2M); plus diaspora communities in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. Kurdish is not a single language but a dialect continuum: the three main standardized varieties are Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish; Turkey, northern Syria, parts of Iraq, Armenia — written in the Latin Hawar alphabet, Bedirxan 1932), Sorani (Central Kurdish; Iraqi Kurdistan, parts of Iran — written in a modified Perso-Arabic script), and Pehlewani/Southern Kurdish (Kermanshah/Ilam in Iran). Iraqi Kurdish has been co-official with Arabic since the 2005 Iraqi constitution; the Kurdistan Regional Government uses Sorani as its working language. Long persecuted in Turkey (banned in education and media until 1991, restrictions ongoing), Kurdish has experienced significant revitalization since the 1990s through satellite TV (Med TV 1995-1999, then Kurdistan TV) and internet media.