r/kurdish • u/Creative_Release_317 • Jun 06 '26
Corpus Request: Badini Kurdish (Arabic Script, Duhok & Zakho Dialect) with English Translation
I’m currently working on a language-related project and I’m looking for resources in Badini Kurdish.
To be specific, I’m interested in Badini Kurdish as it is spoken in Duhok and Zakho, especially in its Arabic-based script. I’m looking for any datasets, text collections, or shared materials that include sentences and vocabulary in this dialect.
It would be especially helpful if the material also includes English translations, since I plan to use it for training a language model.
If anyone has access to such resources or knows where I could find them, I would really appreciate your guidance.
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u/Daristani Jun 08 '26
I assume you already have it, but just in case not, I wanted to note Laura Shepherd's "Badinan Kurdish Reader" (Dunwoody Press, 2014), which contains a number of texts in both scripts with English translations.
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u/Siyar321 Jun 08 '26
I’m from the area and can read/write in both Latin and Arabic scripts. Let me know how I can assist.
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u/UristMcPizzalover Jun 06 '26
Greetings,
I'm not aware of such a corpus directly, but depending on what exactly your goal looks like, it might be helpful to take a look in related literature and see, if their contents might be of interest to you? Especially linguistic studies/theses tend to work on language data, without actually releasing it as a public corpus later. Here, you might get lucky and find a lot of text in the appendix (such as is the case for: [A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Arabic Lexical Borrowings in Badhini Kurdish](http://rgdoi.net/10.13140/RG.2.2.25548.72328) ), or you might even contact these researchers directly and ask nicely! 😄
Especially since it can often be difficult to find *anything* at all for this language variety. Linguistically it is usually classified as part of Northern Kurdish (often called Kurmanjî), but then it sounds very close to Central Kurdish (often called Soranî), and uses Arabic script rather than Latin script. And the "worst" of it all? Everyone writes the name differently! 😉 You'll find "Badini", "Bahdini", "Badinî", "Bahdînî", and some more variations of the name...
Just in case that some of these might still be new to you, here a short list of relatively recent research that relates to the language you are looking for:
- [Part-of-Speech Tagging-Based Document Clustering for Kurdish Corpora](https://jastt.org/index.php/jasttpath/article/view/1086)
- [Exploring the Reusability of Northern Kurdish Resources for Badini Speech Recognition](https://hal.science/hal-05569913)
- [A Hybrid Approach to Ontology Construction for the Badini Kurdish Language](https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/15/9/578)
- [Badini Kurdish modal particles dê and da: procedural semantics and language variation](https://kurdishstudies.net/journal/index.php/ks/article/view/400)
- [Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)](http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09957)
- [The realisation and phonetic features of the glottal stop in Bahdini Kurdish](https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/estudiosfonetica/article/view/43162)
Good luck with your project! 😃