Yezidi Alphabet

Leer het Yezidi-alfabet!

The Yezidi alphabet is written right-to-left. It is used to write Kurmanji Kurdish, which is the liturgical language of the Yezidi religion.

The writing system's origins are unknown, but there are manuscripts of the Yezidi religious texts Meshefa Resh (the Black Book) and Kiteba Cilwe (The Book of Revelation), which are though to date from around the 12th century.

The script is undergoing some renewed use since the beginning of the 2000s in the countries of Iraq and Georgia.

This app lists each letter in order from right to left along with its Latin and Arabic script equivalents, based mainly on Hawar and Sorani standards.

You can use the quiz section to test yourself after studying the letters. For ejective sounds that don't exist in English and Arabic, we transliterated by adding an apostrophe after the letter in Latin script or hamza after the letter in Arabic script.