Central Kurdish
Kurdish language spoken in Iraq and Iran
Central Kurdish, also known as Sorani Kurdish, is a Kurdish language variety spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the Iranian provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan. Central Kurdish is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic, and is in administrative documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".
The term Sorani, named after the Soran Emirate, refers to a variety of Central Kurdish based on the dialect spoken in Slemani. Central Kurdish is written in the Kurdo-Arabic alphabet, an adaptation of the Arabic script developed in the 1920s by Sa'ed Sidqi Kaban and Taufiq Wahby.
History
Tracing back the historical changes of Central Kurdish is difficult. No predecessors of Kurdish are yet known from Old and Middle Iranian times. The extant Kurdish texts may be traced back to no earlier than the 16th century CE. Central Kurdish originates from the Silêmanî region.
1700s–1918
The oldest written literature in Central Kurdish is reported to have been Mehdîname ("The book of Mahdi") from 1762 by Mulla Muhammed ibn ul Haj. Central Kurdish thus only emerged as a written language after the decline of the Gorani vernacular, the Ardalan state and the rise of Baban around Silêmanî. During the Baban era, Sorani emerged as an important literary vernacular and many poets such as Nalî wrote in Sorani despite being proficient in Arabic and Persian.
“Central Kurdish” enters the record as kurdish language spoken in Iraq and Iran. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Central, Kurdish and language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Central Kurdish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.