Central Kurdish (کوردیی ناوەندی; kurdîy nawendî), also called Sorani (سۆرانی; Soranî) is a Kurdish language spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the Kurdistan Province and West Azerbaijan Province of western Iran. Central Kurdish is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic, and is in political documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".

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'íd Sidqi Kaban and Taufiq Wahby.

Tracing back the historical changes that Central Kurdish has gone through is difficult. No predecessors of Kurdish languages 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.

The current status of Central Kurdish as a standardized written language can be traced back to late Ottoman era. In Sulaymaniyah (Silêmanî), the Ottoman Empire had created a secondary school, the Rushdiye, graduates from which could go to Istanbul to continue to study there. This allowed Central Kurdish, which was spoken in Silêmanî, to progressively replace Hawrami dialects as the literary vehicle for Kurdish.

Since the fall of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, there have been more opportunities to publish works in the Kurdish languages in Iraq than in any other country in recent times. As a result, Central Kurdish has become the dominant written form of Kurdish.

Central Kurdish is written with a modified Arabic alphabet. However, the other main Kurdish language, Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), which is spoken mainly in Turkey, is usually written in the Latin alphabet.

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Wikipedia