  One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language
communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language
data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki
languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial
progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the
content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content
in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of
the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and
standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing
handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In
addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other
variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages.
