Who created the Kurdish alphabet? Celadet Bedirxan and Hawar

The Latin alphabet used for Kurmancî (Kurmanji, Northern Kurdish) today was created by Celadet Alî Bedirxan. He presented it in Hawar, a Kurdish journal he started in Damascus on 15 May 1932, which is why it is often called the Hawar alphabet.

The story does not start or end there, though. Kurds wrote their language for centuries before Hawar, and other alphabets grew up at the same time in the Soviet Union and in Iraq. Here is how Kurdish came to have the scripts it uses today.

Writing Kurdish before 1932

For centuries, Kurdish poets and scholars wrote in the Arabic script, the main script of their region. The best-known example is Mem û Zîn, the long verse love story that Ehmedê Xanî finished in the late 17th century. Our guide to Kurdish literature tells its story.

Poetry has a special place in Kurdish culture. One short sentence says it well:

Helbest dilê min vedike شیعر دڵم دەکاتەوە Poetry opens my heart.

The Arabic script was made for Arabic, not for Kurdish. It has no letters for some Kurdish sounds, and it usually leaves short vowels unwritten. Writers and editors began to add marks and new letters, but for a long time there was no single way to spell Kurdish.

Printing helped. The first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, came out in Cairo in 1898, printed in Arabic letters. Its founder, Miqdad Midhat Bedirxan, came from the same family as the man who would later give Kurmancî its Latin alphabet.

Celadet Alî Bedirxan and Hawar

Celadet Alî Bedirxan was born in Istanbul in 1893 and died near Damascus in 1951. He was a writer, a journalist and a linguist who spent much of his life studying his own language.

While living in Syria, then under French mandate, he worked on a Latin alphabet for Kurdish. On 15 May 1932 he published the first issue of Hawar in Damascus. In Kurdish, hawar means a cry or a call for help.

The journal printed poems, folk tales, history and articles on Kurdish grammar. Its first 23 issues used the Arabic and the Latin alphabet side by side. From the 24th issue on, Hawar appeared in Latin letters only. With a long break in the middle, it ran until August 1943: 57 issues in all.

Celadet also edited a second journal, Ronahî (“light”), from 1942 to 1945. His Kurdish grammar, written with the French scholar Roger Lescot, was published in Paris after his death.

Here are a few words from the world of Hawar, as taught in the ZimanGo lessons:

How the Hawar alphabet works

Bedirxan’s idea was simple: one sound, one letter. The alphabet has 31 letters, the 26 of the basic Latin alphabet plus five with marks: ç, ê, î, ş and û. Once you know them, you can read almost any Kurmancî word out loud.

The little hook under ç and ş gives the sounds in “church” and “ship”. The hat on ê, î and û marks a long vowel. If you read Turkish, you will spot old friends: c, ç, ş and j sound the same in both languages.

The last three words use q, w and x, letters the Turkish alphabet does not have. For many years they were not allowed in official documents in Turkey; a reform package lifted that ban in 2013. For every letter with a sound hint, see our guide to the Kurdish alphabet.

The role of Kamuran Bedirxan

Celadet did not work alone. His younger brother, Kamuran Alî Bedirxan, was born in Istanbul in 1895 and died in 1978. He helped to publish Hawar and wrote literary and language articles for it.

In the mid-1940s, Kamuran published a Kurdish and French journal in Beirut called Roja Nû, and a second one called Stêr. Both names are everyday words. In Kurmancî, roj means day, nû means new and stêr means star.

From 1948, Kamuran taught Kurdish language and culture at the national school of oriental languages in Paris, and he stayed there for many years.

Latin and Cyrillic letters in the Soviet Union

At the same time, Kurds in Soviet Armenia took their own path. In the early 1920s they wrote Kurmancî in letters based on the Armenian alphabet.

In the late 1920s, the Kurdish writer Erebê Şemo and his colleague Isahak Marogulov created a Latin alphabet for Kurmancî. Books were printed in it, and from 1930 so was a Kurdish newspaper in Yerevan.

In the mid-1940s, Kurdish in the Soviet Union switched to a Cyrillic alphabet, prepared under the linguist Heciyê Cindî. After 1991, many Kurds in Armenia went back to Latin letters, although Cyrillic is still in use as well.

Soranî and the reformed Arabic script

In Iraq and Iran, Kurdish stayed with the Arabic-based script, and scholars reshaped it to fit Kurdish better. A key figure was Tewfîq Wehbî (Taufiq Wahby, 1891–1984).

In 1923, Iraq’s education ministry asked him to write a Kurdish grammar for schools. He also wanted to change the letters, but the ministry did not accept that at first. His grammar, Destûrî Zimanî Kurdî, came out in 1929.

From the 1920s on, Wehbî and other scholars, among them Sa’id Sidqi Kaban, shaped the script that Soranî uses today. It adds letters for Kurdish sounds, such as a heavy l and a strongly rolled r, and drops Arabic letters for sounds Kurdish does not have. Unlike Arabic, it writes almost every vowel. Acceptance took time: Iraq’s education ministry only approved the new letters in the late 1950s, when they were already widely used.

You can see the added letters in everyday Soranî words. The heavy l comes at the end of the word for house, and the rolled r at the start of the word for day.

Wehbî also worked on a Latin alphabet for Kurdish, but the idea was not taken up in Iraq. Soranî is still written in its reformed Arabic-based script.

One language, several alphabets

Today Kurdish is written in two main ways. Kurmancî uses the Hawar Latin alphabet in Turkey, Syria and the diaspora. Soranî, and Kurmancî in Iraq and Iran, use the Arabic-based script. In the former Soviet Union, Kurds write in Latin or Cyrillic letters.

There are also proposals for a single Latin alphabet for every Kurdish dialect; one of them is called Yekgirtú (“unified”). No one alphabet is accepted by everyone yet, so most learners start with the script of their own dialect.

This history explains why the same word can look so different in Kurmancî and Soranî, and why many Kurds read two scripts. Our guide to Kurmancî vs Soranî puts the two side by side.

In ZimanGo, both courses begin with an Alphabet level that teaches the Latin and the Arabic-based script letter by letter, with tracing so you learn to write each one, too.