Kurmanji | |
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Northern Kurdish | |
Spoken in | Turkey, Iraq, Syria, & neighboring countries |
Native speakers | (4.0 million in Turkey cited 1980) 2.8 million in Iraq (2004) 2.5 million elsewhere (1988–2004) |
Language family | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | kmr |
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Kurmanji (Kurmancî) or Northern Kurdish (sometimes misspelled as Kirmanji, Kurmangi or Kermanji) is the most commonly spoken dialect of the Kurdish language.
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The Kurmanji language, which uses the Latin script, is the most common dialect of Kurdish language and spoken by 80 % of all Kurds.
Kurmanji is the ceremonial language[citation needed] of national[dubious ] Kurdish religion “Yezidism”. The sacred book Mishefa Reş (“Black Book”) and all the prayers are written and said in Kurmanji.
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The main theory about the etymology of Kurmanji is that the term Kurmanji, according to Prince Jaladet Bedirkhan, the great Kurdish intellectual who prepared the Latin Kurdish alphabet, comes from Kurd+man+cî which means, those Kurds who remained in their places (not moved like others). In earlier publications of this century, the term Kurmanji was sometimes spelled with a "d" like "Kurdmanji" but the standard spelling of the term is Kurmanji in English and Kurmancî in Kurdish.
One other theory is that the term Kurmanji is believed by some scholars to mean Median Kurd.[1] Some scholars say the older form of this word is Khormenj (also possibly Hormenj, which means “place of Khormens” or “land of Khormens” in Kurdish). Kurds historically lived in the area Greek sources defined as Armenia; thus Greek Armen could be a rendering of local Khormen. Note that modern Armenians' name for themselves has historically been Haiq.
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Kurdish (کوردی, Kurdî) is a continuum of Northwestern Iranian languages spoken by the Kurds in Western Asia. Kurdish forms three dialect groups known as Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani), and Southern Kurdish (Pehlewani). A separate group of languages, Zaza-Gorani, is also spoken by several million Kurds, but is linguistically not Kurdish. Recent (as of 2009) studies estimate between 20 and 30 million native speakers of Kurdish in total.
The literary output in Kurdish was mostly confined to poetry until the early 20th century, when more general literature began to be developed. Today, there are two principal written Kurdish dialects, namely Kurmanji in the northern parts of the geographical region of Kurdistan, and Sorani further east and south. The standard Sorani form of Central Kurdish is, along with Arabic, one of the two official languages of Iraq and is in political documents simply referred to as Kurdish.
The Kurdish languages belong to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. They are generally classified as Northwestern Iranian languages, or by some scholars as intermediate between Northwestern and Southwestern Iranian.Martin van Bruinessen notes that "Kurdish has a strong south-western Iranian element", whereas "Zaza and Gurani [...] do belong to the north-west Iranian group".