Table of Kurdish Unified Alphabet

To avoid the communication challenges posed by the existence of various Kurdish writing systems, KAL has developed a Kurdish Unified Alphabet (KUAL) or Yekgirtú that is based on International ISO-8859-1 Standards code making and enabled by most common Unicode code presenting. This modern Kurdish (IS) alphabet incorporated minor changes to the existing Latin-based alphabet, as well as new signs. The new signs were added to improve the flexibility of the Kurdish writing system. The new signs were added to improve the flexibility of the Kurdish writing system. This effort was made as part of KAL’s larger effort to revitalise and promote the use of the Kurdish language for the benefit of the next generation of Kurds. KAL’s system was designed and presented to be simple and adequate for communicating via the Internet and other electronic media. This proposal’s viability is explained in a Kurdish Orthography Timeline, which dates back to the 1780s. (For a timeline of Kurdish orthography, See A Kurdish Orthography TIMELINE).

The list of  KUAL with audio pronunciation of vowels. There are additional links at the bottom of this page which allow you to compare KUAL with other existing Kurdish alphabets as well as Arabic, Persian and Turkish Alphabets.

1. The mid-open Vowel Phonemes ⟨ i ⟩ never comes at the start of any Kurdish words but some loan words.
2. The Consonant Phonemes in positions 13, 16, 23, 25 are digraphs (combined phonemes) with no exceptional usage and will be treated as a single letter at all time.
3. The velar ⟨ ll ⟩ is for non-initial positions only ⟨ ll ⟩, in Kurdish Velar L never comes in initial position.
4. The trill ⟨ rr ⟩ in position 23 is for non-initial positions only, R in initial position in any Kurdish words is pronounced as a Trill ⟨ R ⟩
   
5. A Kurdish Orthography TIMELINE
6. TABLE 1: Unified Kurdish Consonant Phonemes
7. TABLE 2: Unified Kurdish Vowel Phonemes
8. See a comparison of the Current Practised Kurdish Alphabets.
9. See a comparison of Kurdish, Persian, Arabic and Turkish Alphabet
10. Kurdish Unified Alphabet (KUAL) System, ISO 8859-1 character set

By Dilan MR Roshani