Kurdish

How to spell kurdish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kurdish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kurdish mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the Kurds, their language, or the region of Kurdistan.

Kurdish in a sentence

• The restaurant served traditional kurdish dishes from the mountains.

• She spent two years learning kurdish grammar before moving to the region.

Where does kurdish come from?

Language of origin: Other

This adjective is built from the noun Kurd, the name for the people of Kurdistan, plus the English suffix -ish that turns a place or people into an adjective, as in English, Spanish, and Turkish. The name Kurd reached English through Turkish and Persian usage, and it ultimately reflects an ancient regional and tribal label for the mountain peoples of the area now spanning parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; classical writers recorded similar names for inhabitants of those highlands. The form with -ish entered English in the 1800s as travellers, scholars, and diplomats wrote about the region and its distinct language. Kurdish belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, which is why it is linguistically a cousin of Persian rather than of neighbouring Turkish or Arabic. The spelling keeps the proper-noun stem Kurd intact and simply adds -ish, so the trap is remembering the single d before the suffix and the unusual k-u-r opening rather than a softer English spelling.

How the word is built

• Kurd (the people of Kurdistan)
• -ish (adjective suffix forming names of nationalities and languages)