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.