Northern Luri Alphabet

Northern Luri (لری, Lori) is a Southwestern Iranian language, a close relative of Persian and of the other Luri varieties, Southern Luri and Bakhtiari. It is the everyday language of Lorestan province in the Zagros mountains of western Iran, around cities such as Khorramabad and Borujerd, and of neighbouring areas. Persian is the language of school and print, so Luri speakers who go to school learn to read and write in Persian.

Luri has no single official spelling. Most people write it in plain Persian spelling, with the 32 Persian letters you find on any Persian keyboard: پ p, چ ch, ژ zh and گ g, which Persian added to the Arabic alphabet, and the Persian ک and ی. The letters that share a sound keep the spelling of Arabic words, as in Persian: ث س ص are all s, ذ ز ض ظ are all z, ت ط are t, and ح ه are h.

CLDR, the Unicode project's database of languages, lists a fuller set for Northern Luri. Besides the Persian letters it has ڤ, ھ, ە, ۉ, ۊ and ؽ and two small vowel signs, ٛ and ٙ, which some writers use to show Luri vowels that Persian letters do not separate. CLDR does not say what each one stands for, and writers do not all use these letters, or use them the same way, so a Luri text you meet online may have none of them.

The extra Luri letters and what they do

ڤ is feh with three dots, used as v; it is the letter Kurdish uses for v, and lets a writer keep v apart from the w sound written with و. ھ, the two-eyed heh, and ە, the letter ae, are familiar from Kurdish spelling too: ھ is h, and ە is a vowel letter whose Luri value depends on the writer.

ۉ and ۊ are forms of و, and ؽ is a form of ی with a small inverted v; in Luri spellings that use them, all three mark vowels that plain و and ی do not tell apart. The small signs ٛ (inverted small v above) and ٙ (zwarakay) go above an ordinary letter for a similar purpose. CLDR does not say what each one stands for and the values differ between writers, so check the convention of the text you are copying.

The optional Persian vowel signs zebar َ (a), pish ُ (o) and zir ِ (e), with sokun ْ for no vowel and tashdid ّ for a doubled consonant, are also useful: some writers of Luri poems and song lyrics add them when the Luri word is said differently from the Persian one.

Punctuation, Persian digits and the rial sign

Luri writing follows Iranian Persian conventions: the comma ، and semicolon ؛ turned upside down, the mirrored question mark ؟ and guillemets « » for quotations. The full stop and exclamation mark are the ordinary . and !.

Numbers are written with Persian digits ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, which run left to right inside right-to-left text; ۴ ۵ ۶ have different shapes from the Arabic-Indic ٤ ٥ ٦ used in Arabic, so copy the Persian set. The percent sign is ٪, the decimal separator ٫ and the thousands separator ٬. Money in Iran is the rial, written ﷼ or ریال, although prices are usually said in toman (تومان), ten rials.

How to type the Luri alphabet

For everyday Luri in Persian spelling, add the Persian keyboard on Windows, macOS, Android or iOS; it has every Persian letter and vowel sign. Avoid the Arabic keyboard: it types the Arabic kaf ك and ye ي instead of the Persian ک and ی, which look alike inside a word but are different characters, so searches miss the words.

The extra letters are not on the Persian keyboard. The Windows Central Kurdish layout has ڤ and ە, but types ه rather than ھ. For the rest, type the code in Microsoft Word and press Alt+X: 06A4 gives ڤ, 06BE ھ, 06D5 ە, 06C9 ۉ, 06CA ۊ, 063D ؽ, 065B the inverted small v ٛ and 0659 zwarakay ٙ; FDFC gives ﷼. In HTML use numeric references such as ۉ, and set dir="rtl" and lang="lrc" on the text. The simplest way is to tap a letter on this page to copy it.

Where Northern Luri is spoken

CLDR estimates about 2.2 million Northern Luri speakers: about 1.9 million in Iran 🇮🇷, mostly in Lorestan and neighbouring provinces, and about 260,000 in Iraq 🇮🇶, near the Iranian border. Other estimates differ, and many Lurs now live in Tehran and other large cities.

Neighbouring languages with their own collections are Southern Luri and Bakhtiari, the other Luri varieties; Laki, spoken in parts of Lorestan, whose classification as a Southern Kurdish dialect or a distinct Kurdish language remains controversial; and Persian, whose alphabet Luri shares. The Iran and Iraq collections have each country's flag, food and emoji.