Central Kurdish/Keyboard
Existing Resources
There seem to be enough resources for Sorani Kurdish that designs have somewhat converged to employing the QWERTY phonetic layout and adding in a flurry of non-Kurdish Arabic letters accessible via the Shift key. However, they all come with their subtle differences. I have made note of these differences below.
| Layout Name | OS | Based on | Design Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branah | Online | QWERTY | Diacritic letters are accessed using Shift + key for normal letter. {} and <> are typed differently from how they are displayed. Characters aesthetically look more Kurdish. |
| ٣+١ كیبۆرد | iOS | QWERTY | Similar Shift + key design to Branah with some interesting changes of placement. For keys that do not have an alternate Shift option, Shift + key gives the key itself (so Shift + 'ه' would give 'ه' instead of nothing). Employs different Unicode symbols for quotation marks and percent signs. |
| Lexilogos | Online | QWERTY | ڵ and ڕ letters are printed using "rr" and "ll" rather than than Shift+'r' or Shift+'l'. Seems like an inferior design choice, though maybe worth considering using both options for redundancy as long as there are no instances of actual "ll" and "rr" in Kurdish. This layout is fully Kurdish (no Arabic letters) with a radically different choice of Shift+key letters compared to the two layouts above. Also uses apostrophes for diacritics and (confusingly) Shift+key sometimes gives Latin letters. |
The Persian-based orthography for Sorani Kurdish has 33 letters. It has most of these in common with both Farsi and Arabic scripts, which are two dominant languages in most regions where Sorani is spoken. There are an additional 14 letters in Arabic that do not exist in the Sorani script; adding these letters gives us a Sorani keyboard that can double up as an Arabic one (or even a Sorani one!).
A 47-letter keyboard seems daunting. The good news is that neither Sorani nor Arabic orthographies have uppercase and lowercase, so just using shift we can type 52 letters. Second, the additional Arabic letters look similar to corresponding Sorani letters, so in terms of user experience it will be more or less intuitive where each additional letter goes.
Because of these two points, most currently-existing layouts developed for Sorani also contain the remaining Arabic letters. Having a keyboard that can function well for both Sorani and Arabic is incredibly useful in Iraqi Kurdistan given the overlap between the two language communities. These layouts are not without their problems, though, so for this lab I will try to develop a better version of an Arabo-Sorani keyboard. More ambitiously, I will try to see if it is possible to implement a usable Farso-Arabo-Sorani keyboard.
