The Kurdish Reader by Khanna Omarkhali comprises an exciting collection of texts in Kurmanji
the northern dialect of the Kurdish language. It is designed to help students with a basic
knowledge of the Kurdish language to enhance their fluency by studying a variety of texts
ranging from literary and folklore to non-narrative prose works. The first part of the book
focuses on the literary works both prose and verse from all parts of the Kurmanji speaking
countries. Many of the texts were produced in Armenia where the dialect evolved its written
tradition. This is the first collection incorporating material from this important literary and
cultural heritage. As the first part of the book presents the development of written tradition
part two introduces the reader to a range of variants of Kurmanji from Turkey Armenia Russia
Syria Iraqi Kurdistan Azerbaijan Turkmenia and Khorasan each conveying the richness of
their forms. This part of the Reader is of interest for Kurdish Oral History Studies too for it
consists of various recordings of historical information based on the personal experience of
the speakers. The Reader contains two Kurdish-English glossaries and a grammar section. This
constitutes a comprehensive outline of the subjects under study along with a fundamental
description of the cornerstones of Kurmanji grammatical categories and explanations of the
main discrepancies between the local Kurmanji variants and the literary language with examples
taken from the selections. Additionally the book offers English translations of selected texts
with an English-Kurdish dictionary of linguistic terms.
