Kurdish printing developed in Iraq at a time when the language was undergoing conscious and rapid codification and it could play, as such, a very significant role in the cultivation process. One aspect of codification that depended on printing was orthographic reform (cf. 8.2.0).

Kurdish printing developed in Iraq at a time when the language was undergoing conscious and rapid codification and it could play, as such, a very significant role in the cultivation process. One aspect of codification that depended on printing was orthographic reform (cf. 8.2.0).

The successful reform of the alphabet required the casting of new letters and the use of diacritical signs. In Baghdad, where 58.6% of all Kurdish books were published before 1958, the letters پ , چ , ژ and گ representing the Kurdish phonemes /p, ç, j and g/ (which do not exist in Arabic) were not found in most presses. Many books printed in the 1920s and 1930s lack these letters which have been replaced partly or in whole by ب , ج, , ز  and ك which stand for /b, c, z, k/. Thus letter types had to be cast abroad and printers were reluctant to invest in such an unprofitable venture.

In Kurdistan the owners of the press were financially unable to replace the worn-out letters, let alone cast new ones. Mukriyani (1972: 15) recalls that in earlier decades, when the use of diacritics ^ and ˇ was becoming fashionable, he and his brother were unable to use them in printing for lack of letter types. They used, instead, the numbers ٧ ‘7’ and ٨ ‘8’, which made the text cumbersome, because they were full-size type faces and could be placed only beside the letter they were to modify rather than over it. Even then they did not have enough ‘7’ and ‘8’ types to set more than a few pages of a book (cf. Figures 3 and 33). Huzni was forced to make woodcuts which were difficult to use. Unable to add diacritics, printers and writers had to double letters, e.g., رر for /ř/ and وو for /û/. Zhin Press put whatever was available, e.g.:. ˇ and ^ on the same letter in the same journal text or book. Printing had become so cumbersome that the only affluent reformer, Tawfiq Wahby, ordered the casting of letters abroad at his own expense. Letter type problems were solved in the 1970s when typecasting became possible in Iraq and a number of presses in Baghdad and other towns were able to provide the letters at lower cost.

Even more difficult than reforming the Arabic orthography was the adaptation of the Roman alphabet for Kurdish. No printing press in Baghdad had, or was willing to acquire, Roman letters with diacritics in 1957, when Jemal Nebez published his booklet Nusînî Kurdî be Latînî ‘Writing Kurdish in Latin letters)’. When the best-equipped printer in the capital, the Ma’arif Press, finally printed it, the writer had to manually add diacritical marks for seven letters (ç, ḧ, ĺ, r, ş, ü and ẍ) in all the printed copies, each of which required hundreds of additions.

In conclusion, Kurdish nationalists viewed printing technology as a major tool for nation building. As a result, access to printing became an arena of struggle between the Kurds and the central governments. Thus, a combination of factors, especially political and economic, have made it difficult for the Kurds to develop their print media by freely utilizing the revolutionized printing technology of the twentieth century. The next two subchapters depict the struggle over book publishing and journalism.

Source: Dr. Amir Hassanpour, "Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan 1918-1985", 1992.