Where Northern Kurdish is spoken
Northern Kurdish is spoken in 12 countries: Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Germany and 8 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Turkey | 5.5% | 4,626,572 |
| Iraq | 10% | 4,208,340 |
| Syria | 8% | 1,909,232 |
| Germany | 0.7% | 555,186 |
| Iran | 0.6% | 494,967 |
| Armenia | 6.6% | 196,467 |
| Lebanon | 1.7% | 91,196 |
| Azerbaijan | 0.5% | 51,121 |
| Georgia | 0.9% | 43,619 |
| Turkmenistan | 0.4% | 22,977 |
| Jordan | Not given | Not given |
| Kuwait | Not given | Not given |
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.
On the map, Northern Kurdish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Northern Kurdish.
How many people speak Northern Kurdish?
Wikidata gives about 14.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.
Where Northern Kurdish sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Northern Kurdish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Indo-Iranian
- Iranian-Nuristani
- Iranian
- Central Iranian PBS
- Central Iranian PB
- Northwestern Iranian
- Laki-Kurdish
- Kurdish
- Northern Kurdish
Related languages
Other languages in the Kurdish group:
- Central Kurdish (7.3 million speakers)
- Southern Kurdish (3 million speakers)
More about Northern Kurdish
- Read about Northern Kurdish on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in Turkey
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 kmr, Glottolog nort2641. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Northern Kurdish
Where is Northern Kurdish spoken?
Northern Kurdish is spoken in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Germany and 8 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 5.5% of the population of Turkey, which is about 4,626,572 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Northern Kurdish?
Wikidata gives about 14.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Northern Kurdish in?
Glottolog places Northern 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.