World Language Map

Where is Central Kurdish spoken?

Central Kurdish (کوردیی ناوەندی) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Iraq and Iran. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Central Kurdish is spoken

Central Kurdish is spoken in 2 countries: Iraq and Iran. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Iraq12%5,050,008
Iran0.6%556,837

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Central Kurdish has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Central Kurdish?

Wikidata gives about 7.3 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Central Kurdish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Central Kurdish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Iranian-Nuristani
  5. Iranian
  6. Central Iranian PBS
  7. Central Iranian PB
  8. Northwestern Iranian
  9. Laki-Kurdish
  10. Kurdish
  11. Central Kurdish

Related languages

Other languages in the Kurdish group:

More about Central Kurdish

Codes: ISO 639-3 ckb, Glottolog cent1972. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Central Kurdish

Where is Central Kurdish spoken?

Central Kurdish is spoken in Iraq and Iran. Unicode CLDR puts it at 12% of the population of Iraq, which is about 5,050,008 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Central Kurdish?

Wikidata gives about 7.3 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Central Kurdish in?

Glottolog places Central Kurdish in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian-Nuristani, Iranian, Central Iranian PBS, Central Iranian PB, Northwestern Iranian, Laki-Kurdish and Kurdish.

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