Prospects for Independence in Iraqi Kurdistan

The press has been awash with talk of Iraq collapsing under the current crisis and breaking along sectarian lines. Whether this is likely or not, one real possibility that is emerging is of the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq declaring full autonomy with recently extended borders incorporating the entire area inhabited by the Kurds in Iraq. President Barzani has told the BBC that a referendum on independence, which is the nation's goal, is being planned for the next few months. However, it is uncertain how well an independent Kurdistan would fare. Iraqi Kurdistan is surrounded by potentially hostile neighbours none of which would risk the instability this would cause among their own Kurdish populations. There are also uncertainties about how an independent state could progress, not just diplomatically, but economically too. On the other hand, maybe an opportunity like this will not present itself to the Kurds again. I hope to discuss some of these potential problems here.

Translation: A standardised language is the soul of a country

Disclaimer

This article does not in any way represent my own opinion. I have chosen it because it discusses something that interests me and I wanted to practice translating a long text from Sorani Kurdish to English. I also think that this article can give an insight into one of the views held on the matter of standardising the Kurdish language, however, I personally suggest you take most of what is said here with a large dose of salt. The writer of the original text claims to use a scientific method when dealing with the issue of a standardised language, but his arguments are riddled with flaws, inaccuracies and bias. I find myself on quite the opposite end of the argument and regard his suggestions here as even somewhat dangerous. That said, please do read it and maybe learn something about what is quite a big issue in Kurdish culture at the moment. In time maybe I will write my own response to it.

Translation: Helgurd Sekran National Park to be added to the Iraqi map.

By : Ramal Qesreyi
Translation : Alex Berry 

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.

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.

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.