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.