Surnames of Kurdish origin

Kurdish belongs to the Iranian branch of languages. Sources distinguish several varieties within it, Kurmanji among them. Linguists hold different views on where Zazaki fits in this group. This page looks at words that passed from these languages into Turkish, and at their place in surnames, from a purely linguistic point of view.

Turkish and Kurdish have long been spoken in the same area and have lent each other words. Borrowing has gone both ways. Kurdish contains many words taken from Turkish, and some Turkish dialects use words taken from Kurdish. Most of these words live in local speech. They are less visible in the standard written language and in general dictionaries.

Identifying a Kurdish loan is one of the hardest tasks in loanword research. The main reason is Persian. Kurdish and Persian belong to the same family and share many roots. An Iranian word found in Turkish may have come from Persian or from Kurdish. Because written Ottoman took so much from Persian, dictionaries often put the Persian source first. One reference may list a word as Persian, another as Kurdish. In such cases the origin is disputed.

Arabic complicates the picture further. Kurdish and Turkish each borrowed many Arabic words independently. An Arabic word found in both languages cannot be counted as a loan from one to the other. Etymologists therefore weigh the sound shape, the date of first attestation, the spread across dialects and the meaning together.

Surnames were mostly chosen from common, widely known words. Words that dictionaries trace to Kurdish therefore appear in surnames only to a limited extent. When a surname’s root is identified as a Kurdish word, that statement describes the etymology of the word and nothing else.

The site’s rule is plain. A root is tagged ‘Kurdish’ only when a dictionary or etymological source states it explicitly. If the source specifies Kurmanji or Zazaki, the record keeps that detail. Without a source the origin is left as unknown and the page is not published. A Kurdish origin is never inferred from a region, a province or a place name with -lı. Where sources are split between Persian and Kurdish, both views are given.

The chronological test is especially hard to apply here. One way to settle the direction of a loan is to ask in which language the word was written down first. Persian has a very old written tradition, while written Kurdish records belong to a comparatively later period. The lack of an early record therefore does not show that a word is recent in Kurdish. Etymologists try to fill that gap with evidence from sound shape and dialect distribution, and say so openly when the result remains open.

This overview page does not list example surnames. Sourced examples appear on the individual surname pages, each with its own citation. Everything on this page concerns the history of words.