Countability in Sorani Kurdish

This paper has two primary goals: to contribute to the discussion of typology of countability systems, and to document the countability system in Sorani Kurdish. While grammars show that Sorani Kurdish has a system of numeral classifiers system, the data reviewed in this paper includes counting constructions without classifiers and a number of morphosyntactic properties that are only used with a subset of nouns depending on their countability. We show that Sorani Kurdish has a mass/count distinction despite the fact that all nouns can be counted with classifiers, and that it has at least five countability classes. Knowing these characteristics of Sorani Kurdish helps to create a clearer picture of the linguistic variation regarding countability and suggests a relationship between the number of countability properties and countability classes in a given language.