Kurdology center publishes 4-volume bilingual Kurdish-Persian dictionary

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Research Center of Kurdology of Sanandaj University published a Kurdish-Persian dictionary that is  considered to be one of the most complete and comprehensive of its kind.

“The first Kurdish [to Persian] dictionary was published 330 years ago under the name ‘Nawbahar Dictionary’ by Ahmadi Xani. It took 140 years for the second Kurdish dictionary to be published by Sheikh Marf Nodi.” Bakhtiar Sajadi, the director of Kurdish studies at Sanandaj University, told Rudaw.

The four volumes of the Kurdish-to-Persian and Persian-to-Kurdish dictionary have 93,000 vocabulary terms. Director Majid Rouhani worked for 10 ten years to complete it.

According to Sajadi, since 1900 more than 100 Kurdish dictionaries were published, but most of them are monolingual dictionaries for words, names and concepts — about 20 of them are bilingual such as renowned works like ‘Hambana Borina’ and ‘Hazhar Mukryani.’ 

Sajadi claims Nawbahar is the best written dictionary in terms of the history of Kurdish literature. 

The Research Center for Kurdology of Sanandaj University in Iran was established in 2000. It has published 35 books about Kurdish culture, literature, and history. 

Persian and Kurdish belong to the Indo-European family of languages, while most languages spoken in the Middle East belong to the Semitic tree, including Arabic and Hebrew.

Students in Iranian Kurdistan have the option of choosing Kurdish as part of their high school and college coursework following a decision to include the language as an elective in schools across the ethnically Kurdish regions of western Iran.

Genocide Watch issued a warning in April that stated Kurds are “at risk for a large-scale genocide" at the hands of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria,” noting the prohibition and restrictions of the use of the Kurdish language, among other factors.