Words R Us
- Sorani (ckb)

Sorani, also called Central Kurdish, is a Kurdish dialect or a language that is spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Sorani is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic, and is in administrative documents simply referred to as "Kurdish". There are approximately 8 million native speakers of Sorani. Central Kurdish is an official language in Iraq. Along with Arabic.

The term Sorani, named after the former Soran Emirate, is used especially to refer to a written, standardized form of Central Kurdish written in the Sorani alphabet developed from the Arabic alphabet in the 1920s by Sa'ed Sidqi Kaban and Taufiq Wahby. Tracing back the historical changes that Sorani has gone through is difficult. No predecessors of Kurdish are yet known from Old and Middle Iranian times. The extant Kurdish texts may be traced back to no earlier than the 16th century CE. Sorani originates from the Sulaymaniyah region.

Sorani is written with a modified Arabic alphabet. In the Sorani writing system almost all vowels are always written as separate letters. This is in contrast to the original Arabic writing system and most other writing systems developed from it, in which certain vowels (usually "short" vowels) are shown by diacritics above and under the letters, and usually omitted.

The other major point of departure of the Sorani writing system from other Arabic-based systems is that the Arabic letters that represent sounds that are non-existent in Sorani are usually (but not always) replaced by letters that better represent their Kurdish pronunciation.

Sources: Wikipedia