Kurdish

Kurdish, or Kurdi, is a continuum of Northwestern Iranian languages spoken across Kurdistan, in southeastern Anatolia, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and northern Syria. The language descends from the Iranian tongues of ancient Media and Parthia.

Kurdish words appear in Arabic scholarly works as early as the ninth century, and the thirteenth-century Yazidi Black Book is among its earliest texts. A literary language emerged from the fifteenth century. In 1787 the Italian missionary Maurizio Garzoni printed the first Kurdish grammar in Rome.

The Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 split Kurdish lands between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran; the Ottomans organised hereditary Kurdish sanjaks under Idris of Bitlis, while Shah Abbas I deported Kurds to Khorasan after the Dimdim rising of the early seventeenth century. The Kurdish emirates kept autonomy until Ottoman centralising reforms of the nineteenth century.