Kurdish Academy of Language

enables the Kurdish language in new horizon

Têgeyştinî Rastî (Understanding the truth) was a semiweekly newspaper published by the command of the British army in Iraq in 1918–19. At the time, Britain was at war with the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Iraq since the 16th century. When British forces began advancing north toward the Iraqi Kurdistan region in the spring of 1918, the paper became the mouthpiece of the British Empire, propagandizing in support of British positions when dealing with political, social, and cultural issues. The paper sold for one ana, or four fils, a very small amount at the time.

Abu-l ‘Abbas Ahmad Ibn Khallikan (1211–82 AD, 608–81 AH) was a Kurdish Muslim jurist who lived in present-day Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Wafayat al-a’yan wa-anba abna az-zaman (Obituaries of eminent men and history of the contemporaries), better known as Ibn Khallikan’s biographical dictionary, is the book on which its author’s fame rests. Considered a work of the highest importance for the civil and literary history of the Muslim people, it occupied Ibn Khallikan from 1256 until 1274.

This is the front page of KURDISTAN,
The first Kurdish Newspaper published on Thursday 21^st of April 1898

Thursday 30^th of Dhū al-Qa'da (ذو القعدة) year 1315, Islamic Calendar

Thursday 9^th of Nisan year 1314, Ottoman Turkish Calendar (Rumi Calendar)

The unprejudiced academics that study Kurdish history are united in the view that the Kurds are an ancient race (1). The Kurds have lived for many thousands of year’s -even longer than written documentation can reflect-in a land that has been described as the 'cradle of human civilisation'. We need only think of Jewish and Islamic mythology, which designates Mount Judi (Cudi) in Kurdistan as the resting place of Noah's ark (2); we know from history that in the land of the Kurds and its surrounding territories numerous advanced civilisations existed, such as that of Mesopotamia, of the Hittites, the Hurrites; the Karduchi, the Mittanis, the Parthians, and the Sassanids.

Like other non-Arabic speaking peoples who adopted the Arabic alphabet after the Islamic conquest of the seventeenth century, Kurds have started using a modified version of the Arabic script to suit the phonemic system of their language from the beginning of the last century. The changes introduced before the present century were modest compared to the extensive reform carried out especially since the 1920's. The Arabic version of the Kurdish alphabet with all its practical difficulties is now to a great extent standardized, although spelling remains a serious problem. This section view a historical as well practical usage of existing Kurdish orthographies.

Modern formal schooling, which is usually structured in the form of primary, secondary and higher education, relies on the extensive use of written and oral language. To achieve any degree of success, the teaching/learning process must be carried out through a standard medium of instruction. In fact, school functions, and is generally accepted, as the most visible authority on the accepted "norm" of the language.

Geoffrey L. J. Haig, June 2004

In 1995, when I first began to learn Kurdish, my interest was captivated by the feature commonly referred to as ergativity in the past tense of transitive verbs. Although it was familiar to me in an abstract fashion from the linguistic literature, actually using a language with that particular feature is a very different matter. However, at a fairly early stage I came to the conclusion that ergativity in Kurdish was a largely superficial phenomenon, something manifested in the morphology, but without apparent ramifications for the syntax.