Kurdish is written using either of two alphabets: the Latin-based Bedirxan or Hawar alphabet, introduced by Celadet Alî Bedirxan in 1932 and popularized through the Hawar magazine, and the Kurdo-Arabic alphabet. The

Kurdistan Region Kurdistan Region (KRI) is a semi-autonomous Federal regions of Iraq, federal region of the Iraq, Republic of Iraq. It comprises four Kurds, Kurdish-majority governorates of Arabs, Arab-majority Iraq: Erbil Governorate, Sulaymaniyah Governorate ...

has agreed upon a standard for Central Kurdish, implemented in Unicode for computation purposes. The Hawar alphabet is primarily used in

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

and

Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...

, while the Kurdo-Arabic alphabet is commonly used in

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

and

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

. The Hawar alphabet is also used to some extent in

Iraqi Kurdistan Iraqi Kurdistan or Southern Kurdistan () refers to the Kurds, Kurdish-populated part of northern Iraq. It is considered one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan in West Asia, which also includes parts of southeastern Turkey (Northern Kurdist ...

. Two additional alphabets, based on the

Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...

and

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

s, were once used by

Kurds Kurds (), or the Kurdish people, are an Iranian peoples, Iranic ethnic group from West Asia. They are indigenous to Kurdistan, which is a geographic region spanning southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syri ...

in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, most notably in the

Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (ArSSR), also known as Soviet Armenia, or simply Armenia, was one of the Republics of the Soviet Union, constituent republics of the Soviet Union, located in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Soviet Armenia ...

and Kurdistansky Uyezd. Southern Kurdish lacks a standard orthography, as of 2024.

Hawar alphabet

Usually it is the northern languages spoken by

, Zazaki and

Kurmanji Kurmanji (, ), also termed Northern Kurdish, is the northernmost of the Kurdish languages, spoken predominantly in southeast Turkey, northwest and northeast Iran, northern Iraq, northern Syria and the Caucasus and Khorasan regions. It is the ...

, that are written in the extended

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

consisting of the 26 letters of the

ISO basic Latin Alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...

with 5 letters with

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

, for a total of 31 letters (each having an uppercase and a lowercase form): In this alphabet the short vowels are E, I and U while the long vowels are A, Ê, Î, O and Û (see the IPA equivalents in the Help:IPA/Kurdish table). When presenting the alphabet in his magazine ''Hawar'', Celadet Alî Bedirxan proposed using diacritics on to distinguish the Arabic and sounds (se

page 12, 13). These are not considered letters, but are used to disambiguate loanwords that would otherwise be conflated.

does not recognize this alphabet. Using the letters Q, W, and X, which did not exist in the

Turkish alphabet The Turkish alphabet () is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which ( Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements o ...

until 2013, led to a trial in 2000 and 2003 (se

p. 8, an

. Since September 2003, many Kurds applied to the courts seeking to change their names to Kurdish ones written with these letters, but failed. The Turkish government finally legalized the letters Q, W, and X as part of the Turkish alphabet in 2013.

History

The Kurdish Latin alphabet was elaborated mainly by Celadet Bedirxan who initially had sought the cooperation of Taufiq Wahby, Tewfîq Wehbî, who in 1931 lived in Iraq. But after not having received any responses by Wehbî for several months, he and his brother Kamuran Alî Bedirxan decided to launch the "Hawar" alphabet in 1932. Celadet Bedirxan aimed to create an alphabet that did not use two letters for representing one sound. As the

Kurds in Turkey The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey. According to various estimates, they compose between 15% and 20% of the population of Turkey.; ; Sandra Mackey , "The reckoning: Iraq and the legacy of Saddam", W.W. Norton and Company, 200 ...

already learned the Turkish Latin alphabet, he created an alphabet which would specifically be accessible for the Kurds in Turkey. Some scholars have suggested making minor additions to Bedirxan's alphabet to make it more user-friendly.

Kurdo-Arabic alphabet

Many Kurdish varieties, mainly

Sorani Central Kurdish, also known as Sorani Kurdish, is a Kurdish dialect or a language spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Central Kurdish is one of the ...

, are written using a modified

Perso-Arabic script The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left script, right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', ' ...

with 33 letters introduced by Sa'id Kaban Sedqi. Unlike the Persian alphabet, which is an

abjad An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...

, Central Kurdish is almost a true

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

in which vowels are given the same treatment as consonants. Written Central Kurdish also relies on vowel and consonant context to differentiate between the phonemes u/w and î/y instead of using separate letters. It does show the two

pharyngeal consonant A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx ...

s, as well as a

voiced velar fricative The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in various spoken languages. It is not found in most varieties of Modern English but existed in Old English. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents ...

, used in Kurdish. A new sort order for the alphabet was proposed some time ago by the Kurdish Academy as the new standard, all of which are letters accepted included in the Central Kurdish Unicode Keyboard: The alphabet is represented by 34 letters including which is given its own position. Kurds in

and

use this alphabet. Although the

's standardization uses (Unicode 06A9) instead of (Unicode 0643) for letter ''kaf'' (22 in above table) as listed in the Unicode table on the official home page, the latter glyph is still in use by various individuals and organizations.

Vowels

Central Kurdish Central Kurdish, also known as Sorani Kurdish, is a Kurdish language, Kurdish dialect or a language spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan Province, Kurdistan, Kermanshah province, Kermanshah, and West A ...

has eight vowels, all of them except are represented by letters: Similar to some letters in English, both (u) and (î) can become consonants. In the words (Wan) and (play), and are consonants.

stipulates that syllables must be formed with at least one vowel, whilst a maximum of two vowels is permitted.

Historical alphabets

Purported old Kurdish script

In the Arabic book ''Shawq al-Mustaham'', attributed to the 9th-century author

Ibn Wahshiyya (), died , was a Nabataean (Aramaic-speaking, rural Iraqi) agriculturalist, toxicologist, and alchemist born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq. He is the author of the '' Nabataean Agriculture'' (), an influential Arabic work on agriculture, ast ...

, the author refers to the existence of a Kurdish alphabet and to scientific and artistic works written in Kurdish. The works attributed to Ibn Wahshiyya are the subject of debate and not considered totally reliable, and this particular book is regarded as "a later pseudepigraph which used the names made famous by Ibn Wahshiyya". There is no other source that confirms this reference to written Kurdish at this early date.

Cyrillic alphabet

A third system, used for the few Kurmanji-speaking Kurds in the former

—especially in Armenia—used a unique variant of the

Cyrillic alphabet The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...

, consisting of 40 letters. It was designed in 1946 by Heciyê Cindî. West Armenian Kurdish Alphabet

Armenian alphabet

From 1921 to 1929, a modified version of the

Armenian alphabet The Armenian alphabet (, or , ) or, more broadly, the Armenian script, is an alphabetic writing system developed for Armenian and occasionally used to write other languages. It is one of the three historical alphabets of the South Caucasu ...

was used for Kurmanji, in the

. It was then replaced with a

Yañalif The New Turkic Alphabet or Yañalif ( Tatar: jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif, , Cyrillic: Яңалиф, "new alphabet"), is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic ...

-like Latin alphabet during the campaigns for

Latinisation in the Soviet Union Latinisation or latinization ( ) was a campaign in the Soviet Union to adopt the Latin script during the 1920s and 1930s. Latinisation aimed to replace Cyrillic and traditional writing systems for all languages of the Soviet Union with Latin ...

Soviet Latin alphabet

In 1928, Kurdish languages in all of the

, including the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, were switched to a Latin alphabet containing some Cyrillic characters. 1929 it was reformed and was replaced by the following alphabet: The Soviet Latin alphabet is no longer used.

The Yezidi script is written from right to left and was used to write in Kurdish, specifically in the

dialect (also called Northern Kurdish). The script has a long history, according to some data, it can be dated back to 13th-14th centuries, however, some scholars trace the creation of this script to 17th-18th centuries. The author of the script is unknown, but it was used for two manuscripts, ''Meṣḥefa Reş'' and ''Kitêba Cilwe'', first published by Anastase-Marie al-Karmali in 1911. It is believed that historically, there existed two sacred Yezidi manuscripts known as ''Meshefa Reş'' and ''Kitêba Cilwe'', but the originals were lost. Later copies of these manuscripts were found, written in a special Yezidi alphabet, however, their contents was distorted. As a result, while the Yazidi clergy do recognize the Yezidi alphabet, they do not consider the content of these two manuscripts to be sources of the Yezidi religion. In 2013, the Spiritual Council of Yazidis in Georgia decided to revive the Yezidi script and use it for writing prayers, religious books, on the organization letterhead and in the Yazidi heraldry.Rovenchak, A., Pirbari, D., & Karaca, E. (2019)
L2/19-051R ''Proposal for encoding the Yezidi script in the SMP of the UCS''
Rovenchak, A. (2019)
''Information on Yezidi UUM and hamza''
Today, it is used by the Yazidi clergymen in the Yazidi temple of Sultan Ezid at

Tbilisi Tbilisi ( ; ka, თბილისი, ), in some languages still known by its pre-1936 name Tiflis ( ), ( ka, ტფილისი, tr ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Georgia (country), largest city of Georgia ( ...

, where the names of the Yazidi saints are written on walls in this alphabet. Furthermore, ''Dua'yêd Êzdiyan'', a book containing a collection of Yazidi prayers, was written and published in the Yezidi alphabet.

Comparison of Kurdish alphabets

Notes

References

External links

KAL – A table of the various Kurdish alphabets
* Omniglot

Kurdish Unicode Fonts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kurdish Alphabet Latin alphabets Arabic alphabets Persian alphabets Kurdish language Writing systems of Asia Cyrillic letters Cyrillic alphabets