English-Kurdish Kurdish-English Dictionary (With Roman)

Kurdish is the language of Kurdistan, which is the mountainous region in parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Its inhabitants Kurds are the Sunni Muslim people, mostly farmers, herders and rug makers. In later part of the twentieth century, they tried to set up an independent state, but they were often crushed, which resulted in formation of Kurdish Dissident Movement. A small population of Kurds is also inhabited in Armenia and Syria.

In the recent few decades, Kurds have settled in many countries of the Europe, including Germany, United Kingdom, as also in the United States. In the Middle East, Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group, after Arabs, Persians and Turks. Their language is not ambiguous, and as such no dictionary could be produced. However, since their language is quite close to Persian and Arabic, the script of Kurdish language has been adoped from Persian and Arabic.

The present dictionary is one of the very few such publications, and has been compiled with the joint efforts of Dr. Selma Abdullah from Kurdistan, and Dr. Khursheed Alam from India. Since Kurdish language never had its own script. Its pronunciation may vary from country to country. This dictionary has been compiled on the basis of roman alphabets, and it has been tried to give the Kurdish words in Arabic-mixed-Persian’ script.

It is thus a very prominent contribution to bring this language in the series of international languages, for which the publishers feel proud.