Use base consonants only
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View positions
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Labial
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Coronal
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Dorsal
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Radical
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Laryngeal
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Bilabial
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Labio-dental
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Dental
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Alveolar
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Palato-alveolar
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Retroflex
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Palatal
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Velar
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Uvular
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Pharyngeal
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Epi-glottal
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Glottal
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Plosive
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p | b | t | d | k | ɡ | q |
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Affricates
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tʃ | dʒ |
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Nasal
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m | n |
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Trill
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r |
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Tap, Flap
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Lateral flap
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Fricative
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f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | x | ɣ | ħ | h | ||||||||||||||
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Lateral fricative
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ɬ |
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Approximant
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Lateral approximant
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l |
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Front |
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Central |
Near-back |
Back |
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| Selected languages: | Sorani |
| Alternate name(s): | N/A |
| Classification: | Thackston, W. M.: KURDISH BELONGS to the Western Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The two principal branches of modern literary Kurdish are (1) Kurmanji, the language of the vast majority of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the area designated by Kurdish nationalists as “North Kurdistan,” with an estimated fifteen to seventeen million speakers, and (2) Sorani, the language of most Kurds in Iraq (four to six million speakers) and Iran (five to six million speakers), the area desig- nated as “South Kurdistan.” Although the two are closely related, Kurmanji and Sorani are not mutually intelligible and differ at the basic structural level as well as in vocabulary and idiom. |
| The languages has | 35 segments |
| Frequency index: | N/A |
| Sounds: | [i] [ɪ] [e] [æ] [u] [ʊ] [o] [ɑ] [p] [t] [k] [q] [b] [d] [ɡ] [m] [n] [f] [s] [x] [ɣ] [h] [ħ] [tʃ] [dʒ] [v] [z] [ʃ] [ʒ] [j] [w] [ɾ] [r] [l] [ɬ] |
| Comments: | Thackston reports the lateral approximants /l/ and /ɫ/ (cf. gul - ‘leper’ and guł - ‘flower’; chil - ‘forty’ and chił - ‘stalk’). Of technical reasons /ɫ/ is not put in the chart. |
| Sources: | Thackston, W. M.: Sorani Kurdish— A Reference Grammar with Selected Readings |