[15] The oldest written literature in Sorani is reported to have been Mehdîname (the book of Mahdi) from 1762 by Mulla Muhammed ibn ul Haj.

Sorani thus only emerged as a written language after the decline of the Gorani vernacular, the Ardalan state and the rise of Baban around Silêmanî.

When the Baban dynasty was overthrown in 1850, the golden era of Sorani ended and poets including Nalî left the Silêmanî region.

[18] Prior to the 20th century, only three non-poetic Sorani works are known to exist being Mewlûdname by Şêx Husên Qazî (1793-1871), a glossary of Arabic-Kurdish by Ehmedî from 1795 and a translation of the introduction to Gulistan by Saadi Shirazi.

Lastly, Ludvig Olsen Fossum published a grammar book in 1919 based on the Sorani variety spoken around Mahabad.

The British began publishing periodicals in the language to mobilize Kurds, since the Sorani-speaking contingent of Iraq was more urbanized, better educated, and more inclined towards Kurdish nationalism than the Kurmanji-speaking population around Duhok.

This pushed the British to implement the law themselves in May 1931, which made Kurdish an official language in the governorates of Sulaymaniyah, Kirkuk, and Erbil.

Kurds were, however, dissatisfied, since Kurdish was only allowed to be used in elementary schools and Iraq had fully arabized the education and administration systems in Kirkuk and Mosul.

Only a dozen handwritten poetic manuscripts in Sorani exist from this period, including works by Hassan Saifulquzzat, Said Kamil Imani, and Khalamin Barzanji.

For this, some developments did take place including the publication of periodicals in Sorani but also state-sponsored radio broadcasting and teaching Kurdish at the University of Tehran.

Iran thus allowed for limited radio broadcasting in Mahabad, Sanandaj and Kermanshah which legitimized and popularized Sorani further.

[26] The Kurdish Scientific Academy was established in Baghdad in 1968 which devoted a significant part of their job to develop neologisms, grammar books, writing style guide-lines, a modified orthography and research in linguistics subjects.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party and its media also used Sorani as their official language despite its leader Mustefa Barzanî being a Kurmanji-speaker.

Despite the deterioration of relations between the Kurds and Iraq in the 1970s, the state still sponsored the implementation of Sorani as language in secondary schools.

'Kurdish' would refer to Sorani which also became the language of instruction in Kurmanji– and Gorani–speaking areas until these linguistic communities demanded education in Kurmanji and Gorani, respectively.

In 1997, the Kurdistan Sciency Academy was established in Erbil with the goal of creating a unitary language in the autonomous region.

[37] World Wide Web has had a significant impact on Sorani as thousands of Sorani-speakers have gotten free access to literature.

In Iraq, Sorani orthography is moving towards being based on a single morpheme while Sorani-speakers in Iran make longer words.

Fearing the loss of hegemony, 53 academics, writers and poets pushed the Kurdish Parliament to declare Sorani as the official language of the autonomous region.

In 2011, two journalism professors from Salahaddin University criticized the state of Sorani in Kurdistan Region which could affect its use among the people.

They also expressed dismay over the method of the Parliament in using the language, since the institution wrote their bills and laws in Arabic and then translated to Sorani.

Nonetheless, the use of Sorani in the public school system is not supported by Iranian nationalists and conservatives who believe it could damage the unity of the nation-state.

Kurdish media outlets in Iraq mushroomed during the 1990s, spurred by the semi-autonomous status the region has enjoyed since the uprising against the Saddam regime in 1991.

Similar to certain other languages of the region (e.g. Turkish and Persian), these consonants are strongly palatalized before the close and mid front vowels (/i/ and /e/) in Central Kurdish.

[57] In many loanwords, an epenthetic vowel is inserted to resyllabify the word, omitting syllables that have codas that violate SSP.

[57] Primary stress always falls on the last syllable in nouns,[58] but in verbs its position differs depending on tense and aspect.

[citation needed] Others, however, have cast doubt on this claim, noting that the Sorani Kurdish past may be different in important ways from a typical ergative-absolutive arrangement.

In the following example, the transitive verb نووسین / nûsîn ("to write") is conjugated in the past tense, with the object "name" ("letter").

[66] Hewlêrî is spoken not only by its Kurdish inhabitants but also by other ethnic communities residing in the city, including Turkmen and Assyrians.

Unlike standard Sorani but similar to Kurmanji, Hewlêrî Kurdish employs oblique case and utilizes different personal pronouns.