Kurdish

Kurdish: Around 21 million people use it as their first language. Kurdish is a West Iranian language. It is spoken in Kurdistan. It ranks as the third largest Iranian language group, following Persian and Pashto. Kurdish, the most widely spoken language in the Kurdistan Region, is in the Indo-European family of languages. The two most widely spoken dialects of Kurdish are Sorani and Kurmanji. Other dialects spoken by smaller numbers are Gorani and Zaza. Kurmanji, the Northern Kurdish dialect, is spoken all over Kurdistan of Turkey, Syria, and in the Soviet Union, as well as in the extreme northern strips of Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurmanji is spoken by slightly less than 3/4 of all Kurds. As for Sorani, it is spoken by Kurds in parts of Iraq and Iran. Sorani is written with the Arabic script, and borrows the spelling of many words from Arabic, although the pronunciation differs.