Kurdish is written in Arabic characters

The Sorani alphabet, also known as the Central Kurdish alphabet, is a Perso-Arabic script used in Iraq and Iran. A standard for Central Kurdish has been established by the Kurdistan Region and is implemented in Unicode for computational needs.

The majority of Sorani is written using Sa’id Kaban Sedqi’s 38-letter modified Persian alphabet. Contrary to Persian, which uses an abjad, Central Kurdish uses an almost true alphabet where vowels and consonants are treated equally.

The Kurdish Academy recently proposed the following alphabetical arrangement as the new standard; all of these letters have been approved and are present in the Central Kurdish Unicode Keyboard.

However, the other main Kurdish dialect is Northern Kurdish (Karmanji), which is spoken mainly in Turkey and the Dohuk Governorate and among the Kurds of northeastern Syria. It is usually written in the Latin alphabet.

The difference between Sorani and Arabic writing

In the Sorani writing system, all vowels are always written as separate letters, in contrast to the original Arabic writing system and most other writing systems developed from it, in which some vowels (usually “short vowels”) are shown by diacritics above and below the letters, usually what is deleted. The Sorani writing system does not use the diacritical (embedding) code found in the original Arabic writing system. Only seven of the eight vowels in Central Kurdish are represented by letters.