Central Kurdish linguistic data

Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Central Kurdish's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.

Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.

Sorani (Central Kurdish, ~21M speakers) is spoken in Iraqi Kurdistan and parts of Iran; Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish, ~15M) is spoken in Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraqi Kurdistan. They diverge significantly: Kurmanji keeps two genders and a partial case system; Sorani lost both. They use different scripts (Sorani: Perso-Arabic; Kurmanji: Latin in Turkey, both elsewhere). Mutual intelligibility is partial.

Like Pashto, Central Kurdish shows a split-ergative pattern in past-tense transitive verbs — the subject takes oblique case, and the verb agrees with the object. Most Iranian languages have lost or never had ergativity. Kurdish's split is partly an inheritance of the Old Iranian past participle's passive shape, which got reinterpreted as ergative.

Both are Iranian languages, sharing SOV order and a chunk of cognate vocabulary. Persian doesn't have ergativity or two genders; Kurdish (Central) doesn't have ezāfe in the same way Persian does. They diverge enough to be unintelligible without learning. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.