Kurmanji — also written as Kurmanji or Badinani in some contexts — is the dialect of Kurdish spoken by the largest number of people worldwide. Estimates suggest that 60 to 70 percent of all Kurdish speakers use Kurmanji as their primary dialect. It is the dominant Kurdish language in Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraq, and it is the dialect spoken by the majority of Kurdish Americans, most of whose families trace roots to these regions.

Kurmanji is written in the Latin alphabet, a standardization that emerged primarily in the twentieth century. The script uses a few characters not found in standard English — the letters e, i, u for long vowels, and c, s, x for sounds that do not have straightforward English equivalents. Learning to read Kurmanji is relatively fast for English speakers, since the alphabet is already familiar; the challenge is vocabulary and grammar, which follow patterns quite different from the Indo-European languages most Americans know.

Grammatically, Kurmanji has features that take some adjustment for English speakers. It has a split-ergativity system, meaning that verbs agree with their subjects in some tenses and with their objects in others. It has grammatical gender. It marks definiteness differently from English. None of this is impossibly difficult — millions of people speak Kurmanji as their first language — but it means that learning it properly requires instruction, not just exposure.