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Picture Languages

Kurdish speaking countries

Kurdish is no official language in any country, but is spoken as a mother tongue in five countries by a minor part of the population. The Kurdish language (native name: Kurdî, کوردی‎) has its roots in the Indo-European language family.

With 8.99 million native speakers, Kurdish has the highest prevalence in Turkey. As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 19 percent is in Iraq. A total of about 27.2 million people worldwide speak Kurdish as their mother tongue.
Distribution Kurdish

CountryRegionOfficial languageDistributionTotal
TurkeyWestern Asiano10.6 %8,986,000
IraqWestern Asiano19.0 %8,271,000
IranSouth Asiano9.1 %8,001,000
SyriaWestern Asiano9.0 %1,919,000
ArmeniaWestern Asiano1.0 %28,000



Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak Kurdish as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.