What we check
Kurdish (Kurmanji) translation depends on audience, script, and review fit.
Kurmanji belongs to the Western Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family and is spoken by approximately 20 million people across Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, and a large European diaspora. It uses a Latin-based alphabet developed by Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan in the 1930s, making it visually and structurally distinct from Sorani Kurdish's Perso-Arabic script. Kurmanji was banned from public use in Turkey between 1938 and 1991, which suppressed written standardization and created significant variation across regional dialects. Most NLP systems either conflate Kurmanji with Sorani or fail to handle its agglutinative verb morphology, making machine translation unreliable for professional use.
We confirm the language variety, subject matter, review approach and timing for Kurdish (Kurmanji) during project scoping. We check the proposed linguists for the variety and domain the work needs.
- Kurmanji is the most widely spoken Kurdish dialect with approximately 20 million speakers, predominantly in Turkey, Syria, and across the European diaspora
- Unlike Sorani Kurdish which uses Perso-Arabic script, Kurmanji adopted a Latin-based alphabet developed by Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan in the 1930s
- Kurmanji was banned from public use in Turkey from 1938 until 1991, resulting in limited standardized written resources and significant regional variation