Kurdish alphabets
The Kurdish languages are written in either of two alphabets: a Latin alphabet introduced by Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan (Celadet Alî Bedirxan) in 1932 (Bedirxan alphabet, or Hawar after the Hawar magazine), and a Perso-Arabic-based Sorani alphabet, named for the historical Soran Emirate of the present-day Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Hawar is used in Turkey, Syria and Armenia; the Sorani in Iraq and Iran.
Two additional alphabets, based on the Armenian and Cyrillic scripts, were once used in Soviet Armenia.
Hawar alphabet
Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish language is written in an extended Latin alphabet, consisting of 31 letters (each having an uppercase and a lowercase form):
In this alphabet the short vowels are E, I and U; the long vowels are A, Ê, Î, O and Û (see the IPA equivalents in the table below).
When presenting the alphabet in his magazine Hawar, Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan proposed using ⟨ḧ ẍ '⟩ for غ, ح, and ع, sounds which he judged to be "non-Kurdish" (see page 12,13). These three glyphs do not have the status of letter and serve to represent these sounds when they are indispensable to comprehension.
