ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Kurdish families in Germany continue to pursue their children’s Kurdish language education, despite the limited number of schools providing Kurdish classes across the country.
Iman Sadeq, 16, is a Kurd born in Germany. Kurdish classes are not available at her school, so she has been attending classes at a different one for four years to become fluent in her mother tongue.
“My Kurdish was dominated by Arabic so I wanted to improve my Kurdish to speak fluently with people when I return to the Kurdistan Region,” she told Rudaw.
The western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia’s parliament officially mandated the teaching of mother tongues, including Kurdish, in schools in 2012. Local politicians argued that supporting students to learn their mother tongue helps improve their German language as well. The Kurdish language is currently taught in five states across the country.
Samir Khidir, originally from Duhok province where he taught Kurdish for four years, migrated to Germany in 2011. After learning German, he began teaching Kurdish in five schools throughout the city of Bochum in 2015. Currently, he teaches some 150 students.
“Students from the first to tenth stages of school can attend their mother tongue classes. In the first two years, they are not graded but their attendance is recorded on their final results card. However, their grades are considered for the final results from third to tenth stages,” he told Rudaw.
The students are aged between 12-16 years, and are mostly of a similar level in the Kurdish language.
According to unofficial figures gathered from schools and other state institutions, there are 180,000 Kurdish students in North Rhine-Westphalia, but only 1,200 of them attend Kurdish classes. There are no precise accounts of how many Kurds live in Germany as a whole, but some estimate the figure to be as high as one million.
Schools struggle to find Kurdish teachers, and schools will only create Kurdish classes when they receive requests from 15 different students. The small number of Kurds in some areas compels those who would like their children to learn Kurdish to send their children to schools far away.
Najm Abdullah also lives in North Rhine-Westphalia. He said that they do their best to educate their children in Kurdish in addition to German.
”We encourage them to attend the classes, despite their other classes already being hard and they are busy. We have to make our children learn their mother language. I hope that all Kurds here do the same.”
Amira Mohammed, also a German Kurd from the area, says she wants her daughter to learn Kurdish, but struggles because her local school does not have Kurdish classes.
Reporting by Aalla Shaly
