Kurdish and Catalan: A socio-linguistic comparison

When talk of modern day independence movements comes up, Kurdistan and Catalonia always feature heavily. Catalans have recently been seeing a surge in support for independence from Spain, thanks in no small amount to the ever worsening economic situation in that country, but also because of the ever present threat to Catalan language and culture which the central Spanish government represents. Then there is the fact that the Spanish political system was set up by those who inherited power from General Franco's dictatorship without a clear split from the past and, at least in some people's minds, returning to it is only one crisis away. Whilst Kurdistan may be in the same boat in terms of being a nation without a state, the situation itself is quite different. Firstly the 30 million or so Kurds are spread out among four different states, none of which are Kurdish. In Turkey and Iran they are still being oppressed political, economically and culturally, in a way that the Catalans probably haven't experienced for one or even two generations. However, due to the great size and complexity of the entire Kurdish region, I am mostly going to talk about the Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region or South Kurdistan. This region was able to achieve de-facto autonomy after the first Gulf War in 1991 and has enjoyed legal autonomy since helping set up the new federal Iraqi state. What I wish to look at here is the difference between the socio-linguistic situations in Catalonia and South Kurdistan. This means I will be comparing the state of the languages and their outlooks as well as social and governmental attempts to protect them. Finally I will give my own recommendations for what should be done for the best interests of the two languages.

Sorani gloss

This is a post I've wanted to make for a while, it's a simple gloss of three sentences in Sorani showing a little of how the syntax in this language works. For reference, '-EZ' means ezafe which is the vowel used to link together two nouns or a noun and an adjective.

This is Iraq

Before coming to Kurdistan I had to prepare the speech which I would tell everyone who asked "where/what is Kurdistan?" and the follow up "no, no it's not the same as Iraq, it's completely safe, they don't have terrorist attacks there," after I had told them where it was. One of the weird things about living here is that I forget that I am living in Iraq, after all Iraq is that far off place that was synonymous, to varying degrees of reality, with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, fear-mongering, invasion, war, torture, sectarian violence, instability, oil and again terrorism. Things aren't much better now and it would be totally crazy of me to go to Iraq, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm not in Iraq.

Hawleri Sorani Kurdish

I've been living in Kurdistan for about two months now and have really got into studying Kurdish. As I have explained in other posts, the Kurdish dialect (or language) that they speak in Iraq and southern Iran is called Sorani. The standard dialect of Sorani is based in the east of Kurdistan, around the towns of Soran, Sulaymaniyah (Slêmanî in Kurdish) and down to Kirkuk. In some ways this is the cultural and linguistic capital of the region. The speakers there sum for a much purer Kurdish without all the Arabic and Turkish loanwords and calques. This is also seen as some sort of standard of Sorani Kurdish and thus is the style that other Sorani speakers will imitate when trying to speak formally or correctly. This can be compared to RP in England. 

At the frontiers of language learning

This post is about my experience thus far of trying to learn Sorani Kurdish here in Kurdistan. The reason I say frontier is because there is very little in the way of learning resources for learning Kurdish and they are dotted around in several other foreign languages. I'm going to try to explain why and what it's like learning in such a situation.

One week in Iraqi-Kurdistan

So I have now been living in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi-Kurdistan, for one week. These are some of my thoughts and experiences so far.

A Short History of Kurdistan-Iraq

Today I booked my flight to go from London to Sulaymaniyah, the second city of Kurdistan-Iraq (or Iraqi Kurdistan). I'm planning to go and teach English there for a year whilst learning Sorani Kurdish. I'm nervous about such a big culture shock, but also excited about immersing myself into Kurdish society, afterall I wrote my final dissertation on K-I, so it's somewhere that's interested me for a while - and the free one-person flat and tidy salary don't hurt. With this in mind, here is a short history of the area that I spent a year researching about.

Iranian Minorities: Arabs

One of the most surprising characteristics of Iran and the Iranian people is the profound and widespread hatred of Arabs despite the massive religious, cultural and linguistic influences that this group has had on Iran. There is a general feeling that the backwards tribal Arabs who invaded Persia were nothing in comparison to the great Persian civilization that had lasted for millenia. In spite of having very Arabic origins, Twelver Shi'ism (the Islam of the Islamic Republic) is considered as an Iranian development. A look into Iranian history can show many examples of clashes between the Persians and the Arabs.

A comparison of Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish

Kurmanji and Sorani, sometimes known as Northern and Southern Kurdish respectively, are the two main Kurdish language groups - although they should not be considered fixed languages, but rather two distinct dialect continuums. This map shows that Kurmanji is the larger group (about 80% of all Kurdish speaker) spoken mainly in Turkey and the border regions of Syria, Iraq and Iran and Sorani is spoken in southern Iraq and Iran. This post will outlay the main differences between the two groups.

Grammatical and social gender

As a native English speaker, when I first started learning languages with gender at school, namely Spanish and German, the whole idea of nouns having gender seemed quite bizarre and, at the time, pointless. As I've studied other languages, I've begun to realise that having some sort of noun class is quite common and it no longer bothers me; in fact I quite like it at times. What I do still wonder about is the connection between grammatical genders in a language and gender ideas in society.

Iranian minorities: Baloch

Despite nominally having their own province in Baluchistan and Sistan, the Baloch are one of the poorest and most deprived of Iran's minorities. The extent of the Baluchi nation crosses the borders between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan and as can be seen here, the main part lies in Pakistan. However, they make up about 3% of the population of Iran. Like the Kurds, they speak a language related to Persian, but also like the Kurds, they are looked down on as being cultural inferior. They are mostly Sunni whereas the Islamic Republic is Shia. They are also intentionally kept underdeveloped. This is the case in Pakistan too where their land has many natural resources.

A Swahili Gloss

A text taken from the Swahili article on Kenyan History. I've included some of the noun classes in the gloss, although not for every word, but this can show you how the agreements work. Note that I didn't include some plurals in the literal gloss since these are covered by different noun classes in Swahili (e.g. NC2 is the plural of NC1 and NC4 that of NC3, etc.)

Iranian minorities: Kurds

Kurdistan as a region is split across 4 countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The area is mostly mountainous and often underdeveloped in comparison with its neighbours, one exception being modern Iraqi-Kurdistan. There are several different ethnic groups and languages most of which are split into further tribal groups, although this is less prevalent in the urban societies. However, the Kurds consider themselves one group, even if the two main literary languages are, grammatically speaking, almost as different as German and English.

Introduction to Zazaki

Zazaki has one of the most beautiful sounding names that I know of. It is an Iranian language found in Central Turkey, often considered to be related to Kurdish and thus included in maps of an independent Kurdistan, but it is actually from a completely different branch of Iranian languages. As can be seen in this image, both Zazaki and the Kurdish languages are part of the North-Western group -unlike Persian-, but Zazaki splits from Kurdish along with the extinct Parthian and Median.

Review of Swahili

Swahili is possibly the most famous of the Sub-Saharan languages (ignoring English and French) and is also the most widely spoken with up to 140 million speakers, although the number of native speakers is significantly less. It is spoken to varying degrees in 8 different countries (Map). It is a member of the Bantu sub-family (Map - in pale green) which itself is part of the huge Niger-Congo family (Map - purple).

Questioning the obvious

A news report from Afghanistan appeared last week which probably didn't shock many people. As you can see here, a law forbidding violence against women, among other things, which had been in effect since 2009 as a presidential decree, was brought to parliament in order for it to be consolidated and to make sure that it could not be reversed by any future presidents. Unfortunately religious-minded MPs have a lot of power in the Afghan parliament and brought the whole procedure to a halt claiming that the law was un-Islamic and thus invalid.