See also Persian for additional information.
Kurdish is closely related to Persian, but has a very different cultural history. In the past, the Kurds were a pastoral people who occupied territories which crossed into Eastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, Western Iran and Armenia. Because the population never had a political center of its own, it was written in a variety of local scripts including the Roman alphabet (Latin Kurmanjî), the Arabic script (Soraní) and Cyrillic (Cyrillic Kurmanjí).
There are several Roman or Latin alphabets used for Kurdish, but as long your computer has fonts for a central European language like Hungarian or Romanian, your system should be able to create the accents.
This table combines the Word 2003/2007 ALT codes plus the Macintosh accent codes for Kurdish. Please see notes on S-Cedille. If necessary, this letter can be replaced with "sh" .
Note on Windows S-Cedille: Codes with numbers over 255 like those for S-Cedille are only available for Word 2003 or Word 2007. Users with older versions of Windows may need to use the Character Map utility. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.
Note on Mac S-Cedille: The code for ş,Ş only works in the OS X Extended Keyboard.
| Character | Description | Windows Alt Code | Macintosh OS X Codes |
|---|---|---|---|
| É | Capital E acute | ALT+0201 | Option+E,Shift+E |
| é | Lower E acute | ALT+0233 | Option+E,E |
| Ê | Capital E circ | ALT+0202 | Option+I,Shift+E |
| ê | Lower E circ | ALT+0234 | Option+I,E |
| Í | Capital I acute | ALT+0205 | Option+E,Shift+I |
| í | Lower I acute | ALT+0237 | Option+E,I |
| Î | Capital I circ | ALT+0206 | Option+I,Shift+I |
| î | Lower I circ | ALT+0238 | Option+I,I |
| Ú | Capital U acute | ALT+0218 | Option+E,Shift+U |
| ú | Lower U acute | ALT+0250 | Option+E,U |
| Û | Capital U circ | ALT+0219 | Option+I,Shift+U |
| û | Lower U circ | ALT+0251 | Option+I,U |
| Ç | Capital C Cedille | ALT+0199 | Option+C |
| ç | Lower C Cedille | ALT+0231 | Shift+Option+C |
| Ş | Capital S Cedille | ALT+0350 | Option+C,Shift+S |
| ş | Lower S Cedille | ALT+0351 | Option+C,S |
The Kurdish Arabic alphabet is similar to the Persian Arabic alphabet, but includes extra letters just for Kurdish. The following fonts contrain all the letters needed.
As of Spring 2005, the international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » Internatinal Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchace.
1. There is no specfic Kurdish keyboard from Microsoft, but there is a third party keyboard (Files.zip) from Ernst Tremel.
2. Microsoft includes a Farsi keyboard. You may have to install it from the Windows System disk. See the Windows Complex Scripts Keyboard Instructions for details on how to activate the keyboard. To see where the critical keys are, go to the Microsoft Keyboard Layouts Page.
Note; Extra Kurdish characters can be inserted from the Character Map. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
See instructions for configuring right to left typing in Word for Windows for tips on how to type RTL languages.
Apple does not provide any Kurdish keyboards, but two Persian keyboards are available from Apple, but you may have to install it from the Macintosh System disk because it is a complex script. See the Macintosh Keyboard Instructions for details on how to activate the keyboard.
Additional characters can be inserted via the Character Palette.
See tips for creating Mac Right-to-Left documents (including alternatives to Microsoft Office) for more information.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]Cyrillic fonts which include Kurdish include:
Neither Microsoft or Apple provide any Kurdish keyboard utilities, but do provide keyboards for other Cyrillic languages. See the Windows Keyboard Activation Instructions and Macintosh Keyboard Activation Instructions for details.
Extra Kurdish Cyrillic characters can be inserted via the Windows Character Map or the Mac OS X Character Pallete.
Browsers which fully support Unicode are the strongly recommended. Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
Note on System 9: Because Unicode support is incomplete in System 9, it may be beneficial to upgrade to OS X if you need to work with Unicode.
If you see Roman character gibberish instead of Kurdish you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Unicode encoding under the View menu of your browser.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type çarşi you would type ¸arşi. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
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There are entity codes for Cyrillic letters also. For Kurdish letters which are followed by an acute accent. code ́ (or ́) to insert the accent.
See also Kurdish Cyrillic Unicode Table from Siamek Rezaei Durroei.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
One option is to use FrontPage, Netscape/Mozilla Composer or Dreamweaver and change the keyboard to the correct script. Make sure you specify the encoding in the Web page header.
Another option is to compose the basic text in an international or foreign languags text editor or word processor and export the content as an HTML or text file with the appropriate encoding. This file could be opened in another HTML editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver an edited for formatting.
Some HTML editors set the direction of the text automatically. but it can also be set manually by using the newer <dir> and <bdo> attributes. See the Right-to-Left Alignment Tips page for more details.
In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
