Kurdish Calendar - Use Cases

This is a C# .NET 10 library for working with the Kurdish calendar system. It’s designed to provide calendar conversion, date arithmetic, and localisation capabilities for Kurdish dates within .NET applications.

Timekeeping using the Kurdish Calendar reflects a distinct identity, utilising names rooted in agricultural cycles and historical events rather than relying on external cultural influences. Modern Kurdish communities use both the Kurdish Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar.

Here compelling use cases for this library across different domains:

1. Kurdish Cultural Heritage Archives Preserving historical documents, photographs, and artifacts from Kurdish communities. This library could be used to accurately timestamp and categorise materials according to the literal and/or astronomical Kurdish calendar. Researchers could filter collections by Kurdish calendar periods, and the system could automatically display artifact dates in both Gregorian and Kurdish formats. This would be particularly valuable for oral history projects where elderly community members naturally reference events using the Kurdish calendar (e.g., “This happened in Xakelêwe of 2700”).

2. Agricultural Research & Climate Data Analysis Agricultural researchers studying traditional Kurdish farming practices could correlate crop cycles, planting seasons, and harvest periods with Kurdish astronomical calendar dates. Since many Kurdish farming communities still organise their agricultural activities around the Kurdish calendar’s seasonal markers, this library would enable scientists to accurately map historical weather patterns, crop yields, and traditional ecological knowledge against both modern meteorological data and traditional Kurdish timekeeping.

3. Genealogy & Family History This library could be used to help users document family trees with culturally authentic dates. Birth, marriage, and death records often exist in Kurdish calendar formats in family documents, historical registers, or community records. The library would allow users to input dates in their original Kurdish calendar format, store them accurately, and display them in multiple scripts (Latin/Arabic) and dialects (Sorani/Kurmanji/Hawrami) to accommodate different branches of families across geographic regions.

4. Historical Events Educational software or museum installations documenting Kurdish history could leverage this library to create accurate, dual-calendar timeline visualisations. The comparison functionality would be invaluable for calculating precise time spans between historical events (e.g., “How many years between the establishment of the Mahabad Republic and the present day according to the Kurdish calendar?”). This would support both academic research and public education about Kurdish historical narratives.

5. Academic Publishing & Citation Management Scholarly databases and reference management systems dealing with Kurdish studies could integrate this library to properly handle date citations in academic papers. When Kurdish-language primary sources cite events using the Kurdish calendar, researchers need to accurately convert and compare these dates with Gregorian equivalents. The library’s strong typing and multi-script support would ensure citations maintain scholarly rigour whilst preserving cultural authenticity across different publication formats.