Kurdish phonology

According to the Kurdish Academy of Language, Kurdish has the following phonemes:

Consonants

 * Just as in many English dialects, the velarized lateral does not appear in the onset of a syllable. Additionally, in some dialects, the velarized lateral changes to a  in women's speech.
 * and are strongly palatalized before the close and mid front vowels ( and ) as well as the rounded high front allophone  of the phoneme, closing on  and.
 * In the Kurmanji dialect, a phonemic distinction is made between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops. Thus /p/ contrasts with /pʰ/, /t/ with /tʰ/, /k/ with /kʰ/, and the affricate /t͡ʃ/ with /t͡ʃʰ/. This may be an areal feature shared with languages such as Armenian.

Vowels
According to the Kurdish Academy of Language, vowel phonemes of Kurdish are as follows:

As in most modern Iranian languages, Kurdish vowels contrast in quality; they often carry a secondary length distinction that does not affect syllabic weight. This distinction appears in the writing systems developed for Kurdish. The five "short" vowels are, , , , and , and the four long vowels are , , , and.