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 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.

Kurdish is best treated as a language family or macrolanguage. The major standards — Kurmanji (Northern), Sorani (Central), and the smaller Pehlewani/Southern varieties — diverge enough that mutual intelligibility is partial. Each has its own grammar, script convention, and political center. Mossyrune lists the major branches as separate entries (Northern Kurdish, Central Kurdish) plus this macrolanguage rollup.

Like Pashto and unlike Persian, Kurdish (both major branches) shows split-ergative agreement in past-tense transitive verbs. The pattern descends from Old Iranian past participles that got reinterpreted as ergative. Persian and most other Iranian languages lost the construction; Kurdish kept it through historical inertia and contact with Indo-Aryan-influenced regions.

Both are Iranian languages, sharing SOV order and a chunk of cognate vocabulary. Persian doesn't have ergativity or grammatical gender; Kurdish has ergativity (both branches) and gender (Northern only). They diverged around 2,500 years ago. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.