The most widely spoken Kurdish variety, used across southeast Turkey, northern Syria, and parts of Iraq and Iran.
Kurmanji is a dialect of the Kurdish language.
Kurmanji is primarily spoken in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq, Iran.
Kurmanji is part of the Middle East region on DialectAtlas.
Kurmanji is spoken by approximately 15,000,000 people.
Kurmanji is not currently classified as endangered. It has a stable speaker community with active intergenerational transmission.
Kurdish also includes Bahdini, Sorani, Hawrami, Zaza. Each variety has its own vocabulary, pronunciation, and cultural context.
Behdini · Badini · Behdînî · Bahdînî
A southern Kurmanji subdialect spoken in Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan and adjacent areas of southeastern Turkey. Mutually intelligible with northern Kurmanji but with distinct phonology and vocabulary, and traditionally written in Arabic script alongside Sorani rather than the Latin script used for Kurmanji further north.
Spoken across Iraqi Kurdistan and western Iran. The main written language in Iraqi Kurdistan.
An older and distinctive Kurdish variety spoken in pockets along the Iran-Iraq border, rich in classical poetic tradition.
Spoken in eastern Turkey. Closely related to Kurdish varieties, with its own grammar and vocabulary.
121 km away
Dom communities in Türkiye (also known locally as Dom or Abdal), concentrated in southeastern Anatolia, with significant contact influence from Turkish and Kurdish.
149 km away
A southern Kurmanji subdialect spoken in Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan and adjacent areas of southeastern Turkey. Mutually intelligible with northern Kurmanji but with distinct phonology and vocabulary, and traditionally written in Arabic script alongside Sorani rather than the Latin script used for Kurmanji further north.
220 km away
Spoken in eastern Turkey. Closely related to Kurdish varieties, with its own grammar and vocabulary.
267 km away
Spoken across Iraqi Kurdistan and western Iran. The main written language in Iraqi Kurdistan.
426 km away
The Azerbaijani of north-western Iran, centred on Tabriz. The most-spoken Azerbaijani variety; uses a Perso-Arabic script and shows long contact with Persian.
495 km away
An older and distinctive Kurdish variety spoken in pockets along the Iran-Iraq border, rich in classical poetic tradition.
Data on Kurmanji from open scholarly databases. Each link opens the source in a new tab.
Kurmanji dependency treebank built from a 1944 Sherlock Holmes translation and Wikipedia sentences (Gökırmak & Tyers; Universal Dependencies).
News-crawled corpus of 115k Sorani and 25k Kurmanji articles (2003–2012) plus IR query set and relevance judgements (Esmaili et al.; hosted by Sina Ahmadi).