Google Translate said on Wednesday that it will add 24 new languages, including the Kurdish dialect of Sorani.

“For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world. And we want to make this possible for even more people — especially those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology. So today we’ve added 24 languages to Translate, now supporting a total of 133 used around the globe,” Google said.

“Over 300 million people speak these newly added languages — like Mizo, used by around 800,000 people in the far northeast of India, and Lingala, used by over 45 million people across Central Africa. As part of this update, Indigenous languages of the Americas (Quechua, Guarani, and Aymara) and an English dialect (Sierra Leonean Krio) have also been added to Translate for the first time,” the company added.

Google noted that Sorani is “used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan).”

We’re adding 24 new languages to Google Translate — the first using a breakthrough machine learning approach called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where the model learns a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it. #GoogleIO https://t.co/5Imnj6ff1E

— Google (@Google) May 11, 2022

Sorani, also called Central Kurdish, is a Kurdish dialect or a language that is spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Sorani is one of the two official languages of Iraq, along with Arabic, and is in administrative documents simply referred to as "Kurdish".

The term Sorani, named after the former Soran Emirate, is used especially to refer to a written, standardized form of Central Kurdish written in the Sorani alphabet developed from the Arabic alphabet in the 1920s by Sa'ed Sidqi Kaban and Taufiq Wahby. (ILKHA)