| Soranî | |
|---|---|
| سۆرانی / Soranî | |
| Spoken in | Iran Iraq |
| Region | Middle East |
| Native speakers | 5 million (date missing) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ckb |
| Linguasphere | 58-AAA-cae |
Soranî (Kurdish: سۆرانی Soranî ; also called Central Kurdish) is the name of a Kurdish language that is spoken in Iran and Iraq. Soranî is one of the main Kurdish languages, which are a branch of the Iranian languages.
Contents |
To refer to southern Kurmanji dialects as Soranî is a recent naming by linguists after the name of the former principality of Soran. Mackenzie writes that the present Kurdish standard called Soranî is in fact an idealized version of the Silêmanî dialect, which uses the phonemic system of the Píjhdar and Mukrî dialects. Objections have been made to the name Soranî on the grounds that the name of one dialect, Soranî, spoken in the region Soran should not be extended to cover a group of dialect (E. M. Rasul, Núserí Kurd, No. 4, Nov. 1971).
In Silemani (Sulaymaniyah), the Ottoman Empire had created a secondary school (Rushdíye), the graduates from which could go to Istanbul to continue to study there. This allowed Soranî, which was spoken in Silémaní, to progressively replace Hewrami (Gorani) as the literary vehicle.
Since the fall of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, there have been more opportunities to publish works in the Kurdish language in Iraq than in any other country in recent times.[1] as a result Sorani Kurdish has become the dominant written form of Kurdish.[2]
Sorani Kurdish is written with a modified Perso-Arabic script; This is in contrast to the other Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji which is spoken mainly in Turkey and is usually written in the Latin alphabet.
However, since the recent decade, official TV in Iraqi Kurdistan uses mostly the Latin script for Sorani.
The exact number of Sorani speakers is difficult to determine, but it is generally thought that Sorani is spoken by about 6 million people in Iraq and Iran.[3] It is the most widespread speech of Kurds in Iran and Iraq. In particular, it is spoken by:
Following includes the traditional internal variants of Soranî. However, nowadays, due to widespread media and communications, most of them are regarded as dialects of standard Soranî:
A recent proposal was made for Soranî to be the official language of the Kurdistan Regional Government.This idea has been favoured by some Soranî-speaking Kurds but it has disappointed Kurmanjis.[4]
There are no pronouns to distinguish between masculine and feminine and no verb inflection to signal gender.[5]
After publishing The Persian Today Corpus (The Most Frequent Words of Today's Persian), as a main program, the writer, Iranian Kurdish-language scholar, Hamid Hassani, is supposed to prepare a Soranî Kurdish Language Corpus, consisting of one-million words.
There are a substantial number of Soranî dictionaries available, amongst which there are many that seek to be bi-lingual.
English and Sorani
As a main program, Iranian Kurdish-speaker scholar, Hamid Hassani, is supposed to compile a Soranî Kurdish Language Corpus, consisting of one-million words.
The standard word-order in Sorani is SOV (subject-object-verb).[6]
| Sorani | Kurmanji | English |
|---|---|---|
| min (for all verbs) | min (for transitive verbs)/ ez (for intransitive verbs) | I |
| dest | dest | hand |
| to | tu | you |
| ew | ew | him/her |
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||