Can Kurds Understand Eachother Across Dialects?

Yes, and No...

I've just got back from Scotland and I had two very different experiences of the Kurmanji-Sorani divide. I had supper with a family from Erbil who speak Sorani and we had no problems talking in each other's dialects and understanding eachother.

Then I sat next to an Iranian Kurd in church who also speaks Sorani and he really struggled to understand basic things I was saying to him. He presumably has had little or no contact with Kurmanji speakers, whereas Sorani speakers from Erbil are so close to the Kurmanji territory (ie north-west of the Greater Zab river) that many of them can understand Kurmanji quite well. When I read out Psalm 67 with this family in Kurmanji, they seemed to follow it fine and gladly got out their phone to video the reading, evidently feeling this was very much 'their language' being spoken.

If you mention to Kurds the botched attempt to create a Kurdish Esperanto called 'Sormanji', they will likely be amused. It was always just a pipe-dream. Linguists sometimes point out that Sorani and Kurmanji are actually different languages, not just dialects. This is technically true, but there is so much overlap in terms of vocabulary that it does often feel like they are dialects rather than languages.

The Behdini spoken by about a quarter of the five million in Iraqi Kurdistan is a sub-dialect of Kurmanji, and it's generally closer to Sorani than the Kurmanji spoken by Kurds in Syria or Turkey.

Other realities worth noting are that often people who speak Behdini understand Sorani quite well, but the Sorani speakers don't understand Behdini so well. It's like Portuguese people understanding Spanish because it's the more widely-spoken language. And then there's the diaspora factor, where Kurds might be working together in barber shops and spending hours hearing the other dialect/language being spoken. Kurdish TV has also improved the mutual comprehension of different Kurdish groups: Rudaw and Kurdistan 24, for example, both switch unannounced between Sorani and Kurmanji broadcasting, so you end up hearing both.

And then there's the obvious issue of script. Turkish Kurds will almost certainly not be able to read the Arabic script, but in a spoken form it may well make quite good sense. Iraqi Kurds in theory should be able to copy with Kurdish written in Latin script, but in practice they often turn away from wirtten text and just find it too difficult. (They themselves likely write in 'Lazy Latînî' in text messages, but that doesn't mean they can happily read a poem or newspaper article in Latin script)

If you're wanting to share Scripture, remember that Psalm 23 or John 3:16 will quite likely make sense across dialects, but don't expect them to sit through an exposition of Romans if it's not in their dialect!