Kurmanji in Turkey: structure, varieties, and status
By: 1.Geoffrey Haig, 2. Ergin Öpengin

To appear in: Bulut, Christiane (ed.) Linguistic Minorities in Turkey and Turkic speakingminorities of the peripheries. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Pre-publication draft, November 2015

Introduction:
“Kurdish” is a cover term for a cluster of northwest Iranian languages and dialects spoken bybetween 20 and 30 million speakers in a contiguous area of West Iran, North Iraq, easternTurkey and eastern Syria. The geographic center of this region roughly corresponds to theintersection point of the Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi borders. Outside of this region, Kurdish isalso spoken in enclaves in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Khorasan and Gilan (Iran), Konya,Haymana, Kırş
ehir (Central Anatolia, Turkey), and in diaspora communities in several largecities of the Near and Middle East, and in Western Europe and Scandinavia. In terms ofnumbers of speakers, Northern Kurdish or Kurmanji is the largest variety of Kurdish. Thetraditional homeland of most Kurmanji speakers lies within southeastern Turkey; it extendsapproximately southeastward from a line beginning from Sivas in Anatolia, and overlapsinto Syria, North Iraq and West Iran (see Figure 1). Kurmanji Kurdish is by far the largestminority language in modern Turkey. Various estimates put the number of Kurmanjispeakers in Turkey at between 8 and 15 million, but any figures must be treated withcaution, due to differences in definitions and methodologies used.[1]