How Digital Archives Index Yazidi Names: Challenges and Solutions

This encyclopedia entry examines the technical and cultural dimensions of indexing Yazidi personal names in digital archives, drawing on recent prototype projects, community‑led initiatives, and established audiovisual indexing guidelines.

Yazidi name indexing (Kurmanji: navê Êzdiyan) is the systematic collection, standardisation, and retrieval of individual and family names used by Yazidis across different scripts and regions.

Pronunciation & orthography

Kurmanji spelling: navê Êzdiyan. Arabic‑script variant: ناڤێ ئه‌زدیان. Cyrillic variant (used in former Soviet‑era Yazidi communities): навэ Эздиан. IPA: /naˈve ˈeːzdiˌjan/. Common English misspellings include “Yazidi,” “Ezidi,” and “Ezdiyan.”

Main exposition

Technical challenges

Yazidi names appear in at least three scripts, each with distinct Unicode ranges, making naïve string matching unreliable (1). Variant transliterations—e.g., “Sheikh Ali” vs. “Şêx Alî”—produce duplicate records. The oral tradition further compounds the issue: many names are transmitted phonetically and lack a fixed written form (4). In diaspora contexts, legal documents often Latinise names according to host‑country conventions, creating additional layers of inconsistency.

Metadata standards and authority control

The USC Shoah Foundation’s indexing guidelines prescribe a detailed “Names and Aliases” field, encouraging the capture of original script, transliteration, and known variants (3). Implementing a similar authority‑file approach allows archives to link all spellings to a single canonical entry. The Yazidi Legal Network prototype adopted this model, creating a searchable name‑registry that stores the Kurdish, Arabic, and Latin forms together (1).

Community‑driven solutions

HÁWAR.help’s Community Archive empowers Yazidi participants to upload personal photographs and annotate them with self‑identified names, establishing a crowd‑sourced authority list (2). Workshops teach participants how to encode their names in Unicode, reducing reliance on ad‑hoc transliteration.

Algorithmic assistance

Fuzzy‑matching algorithms, such as Levenshtein distance, flag potential duplicates for human review. Machine‑learning models trained on existing name pairs improve suggestion accuracy, especially for dialectal variations (e.g., “Goran” vs. “Gorân”).

“A flexible yet rigorous metadata schema is essential for preserving the linguistic diversity of Yazidi onomastics while ensuring discoverability.” (1)

In the oral tradition

Yazidi qewl and beyts often embed genealogical information, preserving names that pre‑date the modern state system. For example, the qewl “Melekê Şêxê” mentions the ancestor “Êzî Mellek,” a name that appears in oral histories but rarely in written records (4). Archivists therefore cross‑reference oral corpora with digital entries to enrich the authority file.

Scholarly disagreement

Kreyenbroek argues that a single Latin transliteration scheme should be enforced to avoid fragmentation, emphasizing linguistic uniformity (1). In contrast, Açıkyıldız stresses the importance of preserving regional orthographic nuances, warning that over‑standardisation erases cultural specificity (2).

Common misconceptions

Regional variation

In the Sinjar region (Iraq) names are most often rendered in Arabic script, while in the Sheikhan district a mixed Kurdish‑Arabic practice prevails. Syrian Yazidis, displaced to urban centres, tend to adopt Latin transliterations for official documents. Turkish Yazidis historically used the Latin alphabet introduced in the Republic, leading to distinct spelling conventions. The Caucasus diaspora preserves Cyrillic forms, and Western diaspora communities frequently employ Anglicised versions. Digital archives must therefore accommodate all these orthographic ecosystems (1,2,3).

Timeline

Data table