In everyday human conversations, verbal communication rarely depends on mere literal meanings. Instead, speakers normally utilize conversational implicatures to convey implied meanings, navigate complex social dynamics, and maintain interpersonal harmony. However, navigating implicit meaning remains a persistent site of communicative vulnerability in bilingual academic contexts, where an empirical gap persists regarding how spontaneous implicatures function across regional languages like Bahdini Kurdish and foreign-language discourse. This study investigates the frequency, types, functions, contextual factors, pragmatic strategies of implicatures, and the correlation between speaking fluency and implicature use in conversations among students at the University of Zakho in the Kurdistan Region-Iraq. Specifically, the study aims to analyse the implicature use by native Bahdini Kurdish (BK) speakers against English as a Foreign Language (EFL) speakers across different academic groups, primarily comparing first-year with fourth-year speakers. A total of 400 undergraduate students participate in the study, divided equally by gender (male and female) and structured into four groups of 100 students each: BK first year, EFL first year, BK fourth year, and EFL fourth year. Following a discourse and conversation analysis model grounded in Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) Relevance Theory, a corpus of 200 spontaneous spoken recorded conversations is transcribed, translated, and analysed. The dataset is examined to measure the distribution of implicature types (particularized, generalized, and conventional), their socio-pragmatic functions, the interpersonal, interactional, and sociocultural contextual factors influencing their deployment, and the pragmatic strategies speakers use to generate implicatures. Additionally, statistical analysis correlates implicature output with oral speaking fluency metrics and gender variables. The empirical findings reveal a significant difference in how communication develops in each language track. Native BK speakers use more complex and layered meanings as they advance. In contrast, EFL speakers develop toward pragmatic efficiency, moving away from a heavy reliance on fixed phrases used as pragmatic buffers and choosing more flexible, context-dependent communication instead. Notably, the findings show that speaking fluency is entirely separate from implicature use, proving that students with lower speaking fluency still understand and use complex contextual hints. Furthermore, no statistically significant gender differences were found in the use of implicatures suggesting that the shared university environment influences language choices much more than gender variable. In conclusion, pragmatic competence appears to develop relatively independently of oral fluency, reflecting academic exposure and communicative need rather than linguistic speed alone. While native speakers draw upon shared cultural schemas, EFL speakers employ indirectness as an adaptive strategy, positioning contextual dynamics as influential drivers of pragmatic choice. In general, this study contributes to the field by providing the first empirical, corpus-based documentation of naturally occurring BK and EFL spoken discourse that offers a comparative framework that advances Kurdish pragmatics and clarifies the independent relationship between oral fluency and pragmatic competence.