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Kurdish has four “geographical” dialects divided arbitrarily and forcibly among five neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia. It has three literary dialects, two standardizing varieties, numerous norms and three alphabets. Further complicating this linguistic landscape since 1918 is the crisscrossing of dialect areas by international borders and subjecting them to state policies ranging from linguicide (Turkey, Iran, Syria) to officialization on the local (Iraq before 2005; USSR) and national levels (Iraq since 2005). Under these conditions, dialect divisions were overshadowed by the linguicidal situation which threatened the survival of the language. The formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government in 1991 and the officialization of Kurdish as one of the two state languages of Iraq in 2005 have removed the external (state) threat, and raised, once more, the question of the dialect base of the standard language. While Iraqi rulers had in the past used dialect pluralism as justification for denying Kurdish official status, now the Kurds themselves have to cope with the linguistic fragmentation of their nation. This article examines the conflict over the adoption of one or two of the major dialects, Sorani and Kurmanji, as the official standard language in Iraq.
