The most widely spoken Kurdish variety, used across southeast Turkey, northern Syria, and parts of Iraq and Iran.
Sorani
Spoken across Iraqi Kurdistan and western Iran. The main written language in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Shareable facts
Frequently asked questions
What language is Sorani?
Sorani is a dialect of the Kurdish language.
Where is Sorani spoken?
Sorani is primarily spoken in Iraq, Iran.
Which region is Sorani associated with?
Sorani is part of the Middle East region on DialectAtlas.
How many people speak Sorani?
Sorani is spoken by approximately 7,000,000 people.
Is Sorani endangered?
Sorani is not currently classified as endangered. It has a stable speaker community with active intergenerational transmission.
What are the other dialects of Kurdish?
Kurdish also includes Kurmanji, Bahdini, Hawrami, Zaza. Each variety has its own vocabulary, pronunciation, and cultural context.
Other Kurdish dialects
See on the atlas →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.
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.
Nearby dialects
See on the atlas →118 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.
231 km away
An older and distinctive Kurdish variety spoken in pockets along the Iran-Iraq border, rich in classical poetic tradition.
267 km away
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety, used across southeast Turkey, northern Syria, and parts of Iraq and Iran.
292 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.
322 km away
Spoken across Iraq and parts of eastern Syria and southwestern Iran. Carries strong Aramaic and Turkic influence and splits internally between gilit (southern) and qeltu (northern) varieties.
387 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.
Continue exploring
Sources & corpora
Data on Sorani from open scholarly databases. Each link opens the source in a new tab.
- Open in a new tabAsoSoft Text Corpus
First large-scale Central Kurdish (Sorani) text corpus, 75M-token large version + 5M-token small version, with topic annotations (AsoSoft, published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities).
- Open in a new tabPewan — Kurdish IR Test Collection
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).
- Open in a new tabLiving Dictionary — Central Kurdish (Sorani)
Community-built dictionary of Central Kurdish (Sorani), the variety spoken in Iraqi Kurdistan and western Iran (Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages).