Language
Iraq's national languages are Arabic and Kurdish. Arabic is spoken as a first language by around 79 percent of Iraqi people, and Kurdish by around 17 percent. The two main regional dialects of Arabic spoken by the Iraqi people are Mesopotamian Arabic (spoken in the Babylonian alluvial plain and Middle Euphrates valley) and North Mesopotamian Arabic (spoken in the Assyrian highlands). The two main dialects of Kurdish spoken by Kurdish Iraqis are Soranî (spoken in the provinces of Arbil and Sulaymaniyah) and Kurmanji (spoken in the province of Dohuk). In addition to Arabic, most Christian Iraqis and some Mandaean Iraqis speak Neo-Aramaic dialects, and around 1 percent of Iraqi people speak Persian and Turkmen respectively.
Iraqi Arabic has an Aramaic substratum, and retains a number of words of Akkadian provenance.
The vast majority of Kurdish and Aramaic–speaking Iraqis also speak Iraqi Arabic.
Read more about this topic: Iraqi People
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“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
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“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)