Is Kurdish and Pashto similar?

Pashto and Kurdish share many common words which are not found in Persian or Arabic but they are not the same. Sorani Kurdish sounds much closer to Pashto than Persian to Pashto. It takes someone speaking Persian twice as long to say something than someone speaking Kurdish, Pashto, or Balochi for that matter.

Can people who speak Pashto understand Dari?

Speakers of Pashto and Dari may not understand each other unless they are exposed to it. However, they share the same alphabet, some words, geography, and culture. Most Pashto native speakers in these cities speak Dari as a second language, but very few Dari native speakers may speak Pashto as their second language.

Where is Kurmanji spoken?

Kurmanji is the language of the vast majority of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and of a few in Iraq and Iran, with an estimated 15-17 million speakers in total. Sorani is the language of most Kurds in Iraq (4-6 million speakers) and Iran (5-6 million speakers).

Is Kurmanji hard to learn?

Learning Kurdish can be hard in terms of grammar and learning resources, especially if you don’t speak any middle-eastern language. The Kurmanji dialect can be easier for speakers of European languages because it uses the Latin alphabet, while the Surani dialect uses the Arabic script.

How similar is Kurmanji to the Persian language?

Overall, Kurmanji is more dissimilar to Persian than Sorani is. Compared in the wider context of the Western Iranian languages, Persian (all three dialects) is most similar to Luri and Tāti (Azarbaijan), thereafter to Kurdish. Kurdish is most similar to Balochi – in many ways even more so than to surrounding languages like Gorani, Zazaki or Laki.

Is Kurdish related to Arabic?

Kurdish is an Iranian language, like Persian. Arabic comes from a completely different and unrelated language family (Semitic), so there are no connections between the two, aside from the writing system that Kurdish dialects in Iran use (Sorani and Pehlewani). Kurmanji uses the Latin alphabet and is a dialect predominantely used in Turkey.

What is the most widely spoken Kurdish language?

There is consensus, however, that it is the most widely spoken Kurdish language, spoken by more than 60\% of the Kurdish population worldwide (Akin 2011, Shaker 2015). Kurmanji is the dominant language in southeastern Turkey.

Is Kurdish similar to Persian or Farsi?

Kurdish is definitely similar to Persian (aka Farsi). Kurdish is an Indo-European language from Western Iranian family like Persian. That makes them very similar both grammatically and vocabulary wise.