Interesting facts about the language

The area in which Kurdish is spoken extends across several countries, and the various dialects of Kurdish sometimes display quite significant differences. For example, many loanwords from the respective contact languages (such as Turkish, Iraqi Arabic, and Persian) have found their way into the regional dialects. The exact number of native speakers is difficult to determine, but it is estimated that around 20 to 25 million people speak one of the Kurdish dialects as their mother tongue. The majority of these live in Turkey. The language spoken there is called Kurmanji, or Northern Kurdish, and is one of the Kurdish dialects with the most speakers. Approximately twelve million Kurds speak Kurmanji. Two other large language groups are Sorani (Central Kurdish) and Gorani (Southern Kurdish). These two dialects are each spoken by approximately four to five million people. Outside of the Kurdish region's historical settlement area, which extends across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and several former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, many native Kurdish speakers also live in Western European countries such as Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany. For example, approximately 500,000 people of Kurdish descent live in the Federal Republic of Germany alone.

Two main writing systems are used to record the Kurdish language: the Latin script, used primarily by Kurds in Turkey and Syria for Kurmanji, and the Arabic alphabet, used for recording the central and southern dialects in Iraq and Iran. Kurds in former Soviet states also write their language using the Cyrillic alphabet.