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Kurdish language

Kurdish (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is a dialect continuum spoken by the Kurds in western Asia. It is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian group of Indo-European languages.

The Kurdish language itself has about 16 million speakers today. According to KONDA, 11.97% of the total population of Turkey speaks Kurdish as their native or second language. According to the CIA World Factbook, 10% of total population of Iran speaks Kurdish. The actual number of ethnic Kurds is higher than speakers of Kurdish varieties, estimated to be between 25–30 million.

Kurdish is not a unified standard language but a discursive construct of languages spoken by ethnic Kurds, referring to a group of speech varieties that are not necessarily mutually intelligible unless there has been considerable prior contact between their speakers. The second official language of Iraq, referred to only as 'Kurdish' in political documents, is in fact an academic and standardized version of the Sorani dialect of a branch of languages spoken by Kurds.