How similar are Pashto and Kurdish? Pashto and Kurdish are two of the largest Iranic (Iranian) languages by the number of native speakers. Iranic people are an ethno-linguistic group of around 250 million people who have had a historical and continuous presence in regions stretching from western China to northern Syria, to parts of Georgia and Russia, as well as small pockets within the Arab world, all of them connected linguistically with a shared culture and history.
In this episode, Hakim, a Pashto speaker from Afghanistan, and Razgar, a Kurdish speaker from Iran, challenge each other with a list of words and sentences.
Pashto is the language of the Pashtuns, an Eastern Iranian language, and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. It is also spoken in the west and northwest parts of Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish languages are part of the Northwestern Iranian languages with three main dialects, Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), Sorani (Central Kurdish), and Southern Kurdish (Palewani or Xwarig/Xwarîn).
Sorani Kurdish (the dialect in this video) also known as Central Kurdish (کوردیی ناوەندی, Kurdîy nawendî) is a Kurdish dialect spoken in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the Kurdistan Province, Kermanshah Province, and West Azerbaijan Province of western Iran. It is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic.
For all those who are familiar with the script. In the Sorani Kurdish writing system, vowels are almost always written as separate letters, instead of the original format of the writing system in which certain vowels are shown by diacritics or often excluded. You will notice this throughout the video in the subtitles, it is not a mistake.
After Persians, the 2nd and 3rd largest Iranian (Iranic) people are the Pashtuns and Kurds. The Baluchi people are considered the 4th largest group of Iranic people. The other groups include Mazanderanis, Lurs, Bakhtiaris, Gilaks, Talysh, Ossetians, the Parsis and Iranis of the Indian Subcontinent, the Pamiris with their core areas of settlements being Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Northwestern China, and the Gojal region of Pakistan, the Tats of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia, the Yaghnobi minority of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the Kumzari of Oman. There are also groups which are not native speakers of an Iranic language but are believed to be Iranic based on their historical, genetic and cultural ties to the Iranians.
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