Skills on AI

Locale Ku 001

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Use when working with the Kurdish locale (`ku-001`) — its endonym Kurdî, Latin script, left-to-right (LTR) direction, or spoken-population data. Reference data and translation guidance (register, grammar, idiom, typography) for this specific locale; see [[locale]] for general i18n/l10n concepts (BCP 47, plural rules, RTL) that apply across all locales.

Reference data for the Kurdish locale — endonym Kurdî, written in the Latin script, left-to-right (LTR).

Identifiers

  • BCP 47 tag: ku-001
  • ISO 639-1: ku
  • ISO 639-3: kur
  • Script: Latn (Latin)
  • Region: 001 (World)
  • Text direction: ltr — left-to-right (LTR)

Speakers (approximate)

  • L1 (native): 29,000,000
  • L2 (additional): 6,000,000
  • L1+L2 (total): 35,000,000

Pluralization

CLDR plural categories for this locale: one, other (2 forms).

  • one — n = 1 (e.g. 1)
  • other — everything else (e.g. 0, 2~16, 100, 1000, …)

See Unicode Messageformat for writing plural messages using these categories.

Translating into this locale

Kurdish is a group of languages. The ku tag generally refers to Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), written in a Latin script (the Hawar alphabet) in Turkey and Syria; Sorani (Central Kurdish, ckb) uses an Arabic-based script in Iraq and Iran and has its own tag. Confirm the variety and script before translating. This guidance covers Kurmanji in Latin script and is lower-confidence; have a native reviewer check it.

Translate ideas, not words.

  • Kurmanji is subject-object-verb, with split ergativity (in the past tense the agent takes the oblique case and the verb agrees with the object).
  • Do not translate through Turkish, Arabic, or Persian. Use Kurdish terminology from the Kurdish Institute of Paris and the Kurdish academic community where it exists.
  • Re-express idioms by meaning.

Grammar and register.

  • Two genders (masculine, feminine) and the ezafe construction (-a, -ê, -ên) linking nouns and adjectives (pirtûka nû).
  • Hûn is the polite or plural "you" for UI and public text; tu is informal.

Orthography and typography.

  • The Hawar alphabet has 31 letters including ç ê î ş û; never replace them with ASCII look-alikes.
  • Currency and dates follow the country (Turkey, Syria); decimal comma.

Common pitfalls

  • Using Sorani (Arabic-script) forms in Kurmanji text.
  • Using Turkish spelling for Kurdish names.
  • Replacing special letters with ASCII.

Learn more

  • Locale for BCP 47 identifiers, locale-sensitive formatting, pluralization, and text-direction concepts that apply across all locales.
  • Unicode Messageformat for writing plural/selection messages correctly for this locale's grammar.
  • Kurdish Institute of Paris (Institut kurde de Paris)
  • Unicode CLDR locale data for ku and ckb (https://cldr.unicode.org)

View locale-ku-001/SKILL.md on GitHub