ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurds worldwide commemorated International Mother Language Day on February 21, but the ethnolinguistic community still struggles with its use due a history of repressive state measures, and struggles to standardize the language.
Established by UNESCO, the United Nations body for culture, education and science, International Mother Language Day has been observed every year since 2000 to “promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.”
The Kurdish Language Platform, made up of a number of Kurdish political parties in Turkey, held a press conference marking the event. Established at the end of 2018, the platform’s main aim is to promote use of the Kurdish language and resist state restriction of its use.
“On 21 February, the Mother Tongue day, we call on the [Turkish] State to make Kurdish a language of education, an official language, and for Kurdish language organizations be established,” Sharafkhan Cizri, spokesperson of the Kurdish Platform said at the press conference.
Almost half of the world’s languages are considered endangered, according to UNESCO, including the Kurdish dialects of Hawrami in Iraq and Iran and Zazaki in Turkey.
Major Kurdish dialects like Sorani and Kurmanji are not among those considered endangered by UNESCO, but they have experienced varying levels of state suppression across the four major countries they inhabit – Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey – through which a Kurdish-majority swathe of land known by Kurds as Greater Kurdistan is situated.
Though Kurds make up an estimated 20 percent of Turkey’s population, its constitution recognizes only Turkish as an official language.
The Kurdish language has been subject to waves of suppression over the course of Turkey’s history, with clampdowns on its use often tied to periods of political rebellion Kurdish or otherwise.
Restrictions on the use and teaching of the Kurdish language were relaxed as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to satisfy conditions for European Union membership in the 2000s and a peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was set into motion in 2013.
After the breakdown of the peace process in 2015 and a July 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan allegedly conducted by supporters of his former ally Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish government began to crackdown on its perceived enemies, which included a shutdown of Kurdish language centers, literary publishers and newspapers.
Some Kurds argue that Turkish promotion of the teaching of Zazaki, a dialect related to but distinct from other Kurdish dialects, is motivated by a strategy of divide and rule of Kurds in Turkey. While some universities in the country teach Kurdish, these classes are often not-for-credit, dissuading students from attending.
Preservation of the Kurdish language ultimately lies with Kurds themselves, Cizri said.
“If we don’t want to be the killer of a nation with history and language in the Middle East, then we have to, before anything, take care of our language…We have to protect our language like we protect our eyes.”
Official but not standardised
Kurdish is recognised as an official language only in Iraq.
The struggle to standardize the language is writ large on the Kurdistan Region’s billboards, often riddled with linguistic errors.
Print shop owners told Rudaw that they have done their utmost to write out billboard text in a standardized form of Kurdish – but paying locals sometimes insist on their own spellings.
“If possible, the Ministry of Culture should issue a decision to be enforced by the Asayesh [Kurdish security], so that when customers come we could write things in their standardized Kurdish spelling form,” a staff member at Qandil Printing Center in Erbil told Rudaw.
The city’s mayoral authority, which gives permission for billboard use alongside the Tourism Board, started a campaign four months ago to fix, among other things, their linguistic shortcomings.
“We as the mayoral [authority] conducted follow ups through our committees. We don’t renew the license of someone who has these linguistic problems or even give them a license,” Erbil mayor Nabaz Abdulhameed told Rudaw.
The use of both Latin and modified Arabic scripts for Kurdish is further complicating matters, Sulaimani university professor Mohammed Mahwi told Rudaw.
“We have turned our language into two languages that have two different alphabets,” Mahwi said.
“This pushes us away from each other, and makes us unable to understand each other when we get together.”
Additional reporting by Dlnia Rahman
