Kurdish Language Quotes

Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.

Our children's won't learn Kurdish Language fluently if we don't tech them.

Little by little, we began to understand that our mother tongue wasn’t the language of power and prosperity. At a young age, our alienation from Kurdish history and literature – from our roots, identity, and inevitably our parents – began, escalating with each year that passed.

is highly probable that Kurdish language and culture began to develop during the fourth ice age (20,000–15,000 BC). The Kurds are one of the oldest indigenous populations in the Middle Eastern region. About 6,000 BC they became distinct from other cultures. Historiography first mentions the Kurds as an ethnic group related to the Hurrians (3,000–2,000 BC). So it is assumed that the predecessors of the Kurds, the Hurrians and the descendants of the Hurrians – the Mittani, the Nairi, the Urarteans and the Medes – all lived in tribal confederations and kingdoms at the time. Kurdish society at

Under Saddam Hussein, speaking Kurdish was against the law, which effectively made it a dying language - like a dialect of Native American Cherokee, it didn't have much use outside of the tribe. By speaking it, it seemed I was touching the very soul of every man and woman in the room, and they weren't shy about telling me how much it meant to them.

Many languages, including Vietnamese, Kurdish and Kazakh, do not distinguish blue and green as English does.

Language lives. It inhales culture and history. It sprouts new limbs, sloughs off old ones. It goes through cycles of rapid growth, unremarkable periods of stable maturity, decay, and sometimes, as with Hebrew, miraculous rebirth.

I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that. Having only one Kurdish parent, or was it more about resisting ethnocide, going the extra mile to learn the language, to understand the history?

It is indispensable, therefore, to recognise the existence of the Kurdish phenomenon. This, however, is not possible without information about the historical background. ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS KURD AND KURDISTAN The name Kurdistan goes back to the Sumerian word kur, which more than 5,000 years ago meant something like ‘mountain’. The suffix ti stood for affiliation. The word kurti then had the meaning of mountain tribe or mountain people. The Luwians, who settled in western Anatolia about 3,000 years ago, called Kurdistan Gondwana, which in their language meant land of the villages. In Kurdish, gond is still the word for village. During the reign of Assure (from the early to mid Bronze Age through to the late Iron Age) the Kurds were called Nairi, which translates as ‘people by the river’. In the Middle Ages, under the reign of the Arab sultanates the Kurdish areas were referred to as beled ekrad. The Seljuk sultans who spoke Persian were the first to use the word Kurdistan, land of the Kurds, in their official communiqués. The Ottoman sultans also called the area settled by the Kurds Kurdistan. Until the 1920s, this name was generally used. After 1925 the existence of the Kurds was denied, particularly in Turkey.