Northern 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 Northern 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.

Kurmanji (Northern, ~15M) has two grammatical genders and a partial case system; Sorani (Central, ~21M) lost both. Kurmanji uses Latin script in Turkey (the largest speaker community); Sorani uses a modified Perso-Arabic script. They share family typology (Iranian, SOV, split-ergative) but diverge enough that mutual intelligibility is partial — speakers manage but with adjustment.

Atatürk's 1932 reforms standardized a Latin alphabet for Kurdish in Turkey, parallel to the broader shift from Arabic-derived to Latin script across Turkic Anatolia. Kurdish-language use was restricted in Turkey for decades, but the Latin orthography stuck for the diaspora and modern publishing. In Syria and Iraq, Perso-Arabic-based scripts remain standard.

All three are Iranian languages with shared SOV typology and a chunk of cognate vocabulary. Northern Kurdish keeps gender (like Pashto, unlike Persian) and is split-ergative (like Pashto, unlike Persian). The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.