This is a descriptive grammar of Kurmanjî, a major northern dialect of Kurdish spoken by the Kurds of Turkey, Eastern Syria, the Caucasus and parts of Iran. Considering that there is no reference grammar of any dialect of Kurdish published in English, and that there are only a few relevant grammars published in Turkish and Iranian, this book will be a unique resource as a reference grammar for the wider linguistics community.

This book covers the basic phonetic, phonological, morphological and syntactic structure of Kurmanjî, and includes some sample texts. The first chapter focuses on the phonetic inventory and phonotactics of Kurmanjî Kurdish as well as some suprasegmental features, such as stress, and common phonological processes. The second chapter describes the morphological structure: parts of speech and the relevant inflectional morphology. The third chapter presents the Kurmanjî sentence structure, both simple and complex, including subordinate clauses. Finally, chapter four contains some sample texts.

This grammar relies heavily on both the very few published material on Kurdic, particularly those of Bedir-Xan brothers and data elicited from native speakers of Kurmanjî. It adheres to the conventions of the Roman-based alphabet, following Bedir-Xan’s orthography and to IPA forms where relevant.