Kurdish is a phonetic script. Each sound has its own character. Once you have learnt the Script, you can read as it is written!

There are three scripts in use to write Kurdish:

• Latin script used for Kurmanji in Turkey and Syria
  
• Arabic script used for Sorani and Badini in Iraq and Iran
• Kyrillic script used for Kurmanji in Armenia

The Kurds in Iraq and Iran use a modified arabic script with some additional characters. There is still not an official Microsoft keyboard to write in Kurdish. Neither the Arabic nor the Farsi keyboard contain all Kurdish characters.

In the 1990s, the Kurds have developed a set of Kurdish non-unicode fonts who work on an Arabic keyboard (e.g. Ali-Fonts). Many Kurds are already used to the order of the Arabic keyboard. The big disadvantage of this system is, that the text becomes unreadable, when the corresponding fonts are missing. This is because the typed code behind the Kurdish character remains Arabic!

To write e.g. on the internet it is vital to use a unicode font. A Kurdish unicode text works with some Microsoft Fonts like Arial and Times New Roman, but there has been a set of Kurdish Unicode Fonts (e.g. Unikurd-Fonts)  developed by www.kurditgroup.org.

To write Kurdish efficiently, you need also a corresponding keyboard. Kurditgroup has also developed a Kurdish QWERTY keyboard, that makes it for non-arabic speakers quite easy to type. Advanced user can adapt their keyboard to their preferences using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.

Before you can write Kurdish using the fonts below, you further need to enable the the middle eastern languages in Windows in order to be able to write from right to left.

For Mac Fonts and Keyboard please visit www.kurditgroup.org.

If you have a text written with a non-unicode font, e.g. Ali-Font, you could convert it here into a unicode text: www.kurditgroup.org/fontconvertor