Sorani is the second major dialect of Kurdish, spoken primarily in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and in the Kurdish areas of western Iran. If you are a Kurd from Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, or Kirkuk, Sorani is likely your native dialect. It is the official language of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, which means it has an administrative and educational infrastructure that Kurmanji, in many regions, still lacks.

Sorani is written in a modified form of the Perso-Arabic script, a significant difference from Kurmanji’s Latin-based alphabet. This means that Kurmanji and Sorani speakers, while they share much vocabulary and can often understand each other with some effort, approach the written form of their language through entirely different scripts. A Kurdish American whose family is from northern Iraq may have learned Sorani in an Arabic-script medium; one whose family is from southeastern Turkey may have learned Kurmanji in Latin script. They are both speaking Kurdish, but the written forms they encounter look completely different.

KASA serves speakers of both dialects, and our language programs include instruction in Kurmanji. We recognize that the diversity of dialects within Kurdish is a richness, not a problem, and our approach to language education reflects that.