The Badini Alphabet: Arabic and Latin Scripts
Badini Kurdish is written in two different scripts. Depending on where a speaker lives, they might use Arabic-based letters, Latin-based letters, or both. This dual-script reality is one of the most interesting things about the language, and it's also one of the biggest challenges for anyone trying to learn or translate it.
Arabic Script
In Iraq, Badini is primarily written using a modified Arabic script. This is the version you'll see in schools, government documents, books, and local media across the Badinan region. The Kurdish Arabic alphabet includes extra letters that don't exist in standard Arabic, added to represent sounds unique to Kurdish. For example, letters for "p", "v", "g", and certain vowel sounds. If you grew up in Duhok, Zakho, or Aqrah, this is likely the script you learned first.
Latin Script
The Latin-based Kurdish alphabet was developed in the early 20th century by Jeladet Ali Bedirkhan, a Kurdish intellectual. It's sometimes called the Bedirxan alphabet or Hawar alphabet (named after the magazine where it was first published). This script is widely used by Kurmanji speakers in Turkey and by Kurdish communities in Europe. It uses familiar Latin characters with a few additions and modifications, like the letters ç, ş, û, and î.
Why Two Scripts?
The split comes down to politics and geography. In Iraq, Kurdish was historically written in Arabic script because of the country's Arabic-dominant administration. Schools taught it that way, and it became the standard. In Turkey, where the Arabic script was abolished in the 1920s for all languages, Kurdish speakers adopted a Latin-based system instead. Kurdish diaspora communities in Europe also gravitated toward Latin script since it's easier to type on standard keyboards and closer to the scripts of their new home countries.
The result is that the same language, spoken the same way, gets written in two completely different alphabets. A Badini speaker from Duhok and one from the Kurdish community in Germany might struggle to read each other's writing, even though they speak the same dialect.
How the Translator Handles Both
Badini Translator was built with this dual-script reality in mind. Every translation produces output in both Arabic and Latin script simultaneously. You don't need to choose one or the other. If you're translating into Badini, you'll see both versions side by side. If you're translating from Badini, you can input text in either script, and the tool will understand it.
This makes the tool useful for everyone, whether you read Arabic script, Latin script, or you're trying to learn the one you don't know yet.
See It in Action
Want to see how Badini looks in both scripts? Try the translatorand type any phrase. You'll get the Arabic and Latin versions instantly. It's free and works right in your browser.