Languages
Native
Arabic (Mesopotamian)
77%
Kurdish
17%
Secondary languages
English
25%
Language Samples
مرحبا، شلونك؟
Marhaba, shloonak?
Hello, how are you? (Iraqi dialect)
زين، شكراً.
Zain, shukran.
Fine, thank you.
واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، أربعة، خمسة، ستة، سبعة، ثمانية، تسعة، عشرة.
Wahid, ithnan, thalatha, arba'a, khamsa, sitta, sab'a, thamaniya, tis'a, ashara.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Iraq's linguistic history is among the richest in the world. Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — was home to Sumerian, the world's oldest known written language, followed by Akkadian and then Aramaic before the Arab conquests of the 7th century brought Arabic. Mesopotamian Arabic developed distinctive features, absorbing vocabulary from Aramaic and later Turkish and Persian. Kurdish, a Northwestern Iranian language, is co-official and dominant in the Kurdistan Region in the north.
Similar Languages
Hebrew
58%
Amharic
22%
Aramaic
35%
Maltese
30%
Media
The Arch of Ctesiphon, a remnant of the ancient Sassanid capital near modern Baghdad
Photo: Safa.daneshvar · CC BY-SA 4.0
Did You Know
01
The word 'algebra' comes from Arabic 'al-jabr', from the title of a book written by the 9th-century Baghdad scholar al-Khwarizmi.
02
Mesopotamian Arabic uniquely retains the word 'shloon' (how) — a loanword descended from the ancient Aramaic language.
03
Iraq is home to one of the last communities of Mandaean Aramaic speakers, a non-Muslim ancient tradition.