World Language Map

Where is Southern Kurdish spoken?

Southern Kurdish is an Indo-European language, spoken in Iran and Iraq. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Language families (largest ten)

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  • Austronesian
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  • 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 Southern Kurdish is spoken

Southern Kurdish is spoken in 2 countries: Iran and Iraq. 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
Iran4.5%3,977,410
IraqNot givenNot 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.

Southern 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 Southern Kurdish?

Wikidata gives about 3 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Southern Kurdish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Southern 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. Southern Kurdish

Related languages

Other languages in the Kurdish group:

More about Southern Kurdish

Codes: ISO 639-3 sdh, Glottolog sout2640. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Southern Kurdish

Where is Southern Kurdish spoken?

Southern Kurdish is spoken in Iran and Iraq. Unicode CLDR puts it at 4.5% of the population of Iran, which is about 3,977,410 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Southern Kurdish?

Wikidata gives about 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 Southern Kurdish in?

Glottolog places Southern 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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