Kurdish phrasebook
Western Iranian language
Kurdish (Kurdî / کوردی) is the language of the Kurdish people who live in the region known as Kurdistan, which includes parts of four countries Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as a small part of Armenia near the Turkish border.
Kurdish is an Indo-European language, part of an enormous language family that includes many languages of the Indian sub-continent and most of the languages of Europe. Its branch of that family includes the other modern languages Persian, Pushtu and Balochi, but none of those are mutually intelligible. Kurdish is completely unrelated to Turkish and Arabic, though it includes some loanwords from those languages.
This phrase book is for the Kurmanji dialect (Northern Kurdish) which covers most of the Bhadinan area of Iraqi Kurdistan and Kurdistan of southern Turkey. Sorani (Central Kurdish) is spoken in most of Iraqi Kurdistan and parts of Iranian Kurdistan, Pehlewani (Southern Kurdish) mostly in Iran. The dialects are not mutually intelligible.
The script of choice for written Kurdish differs according to the country — the Roman alphabet is in use in Turkey, Syria and Armenia while the Kurds of Iraq and Iran use the Arabic script.