Language codes for Kurdish (Central and Northern)

[Sarchia]

In Unicode and most internet projects, such as Wikipedia, the "ku" code is used for Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) and "ckb" is used for Central Kurdish (Sorani).

Microsoft used "ku" for Central Kurdish and "kmr" for Northern Kurdish. This is a big problem and must be solved in all Microsoft Products.

Document Details

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• ID: 3452c464-0135-aaab-5e96-a88f3144e378
• Version Independent ID: 3816f475-bf5f-b5b4-9458-5cc70e93d55e
• Content: Language support - Translator - Azure Cognitive Services
• Content Source: articles/cognitive-services/Translator/language-support.md
• Service: cognitive-services
• Sub-service: translator-text
• GitHub Login: @laujan
• Microsoft Alias: lajanuar

[ram-msft]

@Sarchia Thanks for the question. We are investigating the issue and will update you shortly.

[YutongTie-MSFT]

Hello @Sarchia I just did some research, I think the iso code is consistent with the document, please let me know if there are any official reference we should look into.

As below iso636 list, the kmr reprsents to Northern Kurdish
https://iso639-3.sil.org/code/kmr

ckb represnts to centural Kurdish
https://iso639-3.sil.org/code_tables/639/data/all?title=ckb&field_iso639_cd_st_mmbrshp_639_1_tid=All&name_3=&field_iso639_element_scope_tid=All&field_iso639_language_type_tid=All&items_per_page=200

As wiki, ku is for general Kurdish.

This is current Microsoft Language support list:

We will now proceed to close this thread. If you find any other referrnece we should look at, please respond here and @YutongTie-MSFT and we will gladly continue the discussion.

[Sarchia]

It is right that 'ku' is for Kurdish, but it was assigned to Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) in most platforms, such as Wikipedia, Google, and many localization platforms. There is not much use of 'kmr', only in the cases when for all languages ISO639-3 is used.

Even if you don't change 'kmr' here, for Central Kurdish (Sorani) the code 'ckb' must be used. For all the products not only the translator.
I emailed about this issue to the Edge team, they agreed to my suggestions but I think they had issue with implementing it.

[YutongTie-MSFT]

@Sarchia Thanks a lot, I will involve the content author to make the best change.

@laujan Could you please check on this case? Thanks!

[YutongTie-MSFT]

Update: Engineering team is working on this issue and it's already in the backlog. I will close this thread since it's not under document scope. Thank you.

[laujan]

Hi @Sarchia, Thank you for alerting us to this issue. I spoke with the engineering teams and they are aware of the language code error and are exploring ways to resolve the issue across all platforms. Thank you again!

cc: @YutongTie-MSFT

[Sarchia]

Thank you. I hope you tell the team to add a keyboard layout for Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) to Windows and support it on Bing search too. There is a lot of demand for this.

[CrowdsourceKurdish]

Hi @YutongTie-MSFT @ram-msft @laujan
This issue continues to cause errors in the use of Microsoft services.
Any progress on resolving this issue?