Volume 2012, Issue 217 - The Kurdish Linguistic Landscape: Vitality, Linguicide and Resistance

It has been claimed that the 1979 revolution in Iran transformed the country in many respects. This article aims to examine the extent to which the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has deviated, if at all, from the linguicidal policies of the Pahlavi dynasty towards non-Persian languages in Iran. The article finds, in both the monarchical and IRI regimes, a policy of (a) treating multilingualism as a threat to the country's territorial integrity and national unity, (b) restricting the use of non-Persian languages, and (3) promoting the supremacy of Persian as a venue for unifying the ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous body politic. While the continuity in the language policy of the two regimes is prominent, differences will be noted especially in the changing geolinguistic context of the region where Kurdish has achieved the status of an official language in Iraq (since 2005) and has enjoyed some level of tolerance in the linguicidal Turkish state (since 1991). New communication technologies as well as cross-border social and linguistic networking among the Kurds throughout Kurdistan and the world have changed the language environment but not the official policy of “one-nation=one-language”. Persianization of non-Persian peoples continues to be the building block of the Islamic regime's language policy.

Kurdish has four “geographical” dialects divided arbitrarily and forcibly among five neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia. It has three literary dialects, two standardizing varieties, numerous norms and three alphabets. Further complicating this linguistic landscape since 1918 is the crisscrossing of dialect areas by international borders and subjecting them to state policies ranging from linguicide (Turkey, Iran, Syria) to officialization on the local (Iraq before 2005; USSR) and national levels (Iraq since 2005). Under these conditions, dialect divisions were overshadowed by the linguicidal situation which threatened the survival of the language. The formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government in 1991 and the officialization of Kurdish as one of the two state languages of Iraq in 2005 have removed the external (state) threat, and raised, once more, the question of the dialect base of the standard language. While Iraqi rulers had in the past used dialect pluralism as justification for denying Kurdish official status, now the Kurds themselves have to cope with the linguistic fragmentation of their nation. This article examines the conflict over the adoption of one or two of the major dialects, Sorani and Kurmanji, as the official standard language in Iraq.

Zygmunt Bauman, Alexander Laban Hilton and Paul Havemann, amongst others, have argued that genocide is intimately linked to modernity. Modern discourses on development, modernization and western science as well as key meta-narratives of modernity (advancing the teleological myth of progress and civilization), “gardener's visions” and the very categorization and standardization of national languages (crucial to the biopolitical formation of global populations under the system of modern nation-states) have all legitimated and effected policies and practices that have been genocidal in their nature and scope. This article examines and details the extent to which all these identified aspects of modernity can be observed in the case of Turkey. The findings indicate that linguistic/cultural and physical genocide of Kurds in Turkey has taken place (over the past eight and a half decades) as a direct consequence of the Kemalist/Ataturkist modernity project. Language policy – which has advocated linguistic imperialism alongside linguistic genocide – has been a critical tool for the creation of the modern Turkish nation-state.

This article examines the Turkish state's assimilationist policy towards the Kurds and the Kurdish language in Turkey. It studies how the Turkish nationalist elites, the Kemalists, have throughout the 20th century systematically suppressed the Kurdish language as part of their aim to construct a homogenous nation-state of Turkish speakers. It shows that this linguicidal policy was strongly informed by the traumatic collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent Kemalist emphasis on complete ethno-linguistic homogeneity as criteria for being “Turkish”, “Western” and “civilised”. The article discusses the various “Turkification” strategies of the authorities, such as banning the Kurdish language, the denial of the existence of the Kurds, changing the names of towns and villages, the forced re-settlement of Kurds and the assimilation of Kurdish children. It critically analyses the recent developments in Turkey's Kurdish language policy and the reform efforts of the current government as part of the country's EU candidacy. The article reflects however, that whilst looking good on paper, these reforms have had little impact in reality and Kurdish speakers in Turkey are still systematically denied their basic human and linguistic rights.

This article addresses Young Turk language policy towards Kurdish in the interwar period. It argues that most Young Turk nationalists treated Turkey's Kurdish minority as assimilable raw ethnic material, as a result of which Kurds became the object of large-scale cultural and linguistic policies aimed at “Turkification”. This article charts how these language policies infringed upon Kurdish life. It will (a) briefly introduce the Young Turk cultural revolution of 1913–1950, (b) discuss how the Young Turk dictatorship perceived the Turkish language as a vehicle for cultural assimilation, and (c) provide a detailed account of one example of a boarding school for Kurdish children. It concludes that there is evidence that a policy of cultural genocide against Kurds was implemented but relativizes its impact by discussing the Kurds' ambivalent reception of those policies.

This article aims at exploring the minority status of Kurdish language in Turkey. It asks two main questions: (1) In what ways have state policies and socio-historical conditions influenced the evolution of linguistic behavior of Kurdish speakers? (2) What are the mechanisms through which language maintenance versus language shift tendencies operate in the speech community? The article discusses the objective dimensions of the language situation in the Kurdish region of Turkey. It then presents an account of daily language practices and perceptions of Kurdish speakers. It shows that language use and choice are significantly related to variables such as age, gender, education level, rural versus urban dwelling and the overall socio-cultural and political contexts of such uses and choices. The article further indicates that although the general tendency is to follow the functional separation of languages, the language situation in this context is not an example of stable diglossia, as Turkish exerts its increasing presence in low domains whereas Kurdish, by contrast, has started to infringe into high domains like media and institutions. The article concludes that the prevalent community bilingualism evolves to the detriment of Kurdish, leading to a shift-oriented linguistic situation for Kurdish.

This study focuses on a situation of retentive multilingualism and transmission of more than one language in the diaspora. The population in question are bi- or multilinguals who, in an immigrant situation, added a further language, English, to their repertoire. Sixty-six Iraq-born informants who identified as Chaldeans or Assyrians now living in Melbourne, Australia were interviewed about their nominated “first” language, situation and context of acquisition, self-declared level of proficiency and notions of attachment towards and co-identification with respective languages. Proficiency and use of Chaldean and Assyrian remain high among respondents, despite these languages' level of endangerment in Iraq. Only five informants had shifted to Arabic as their “dominant” language. However, Arabic has become, and remains, an established code in in-group situations. Although contact with Arabic-speaking Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabic-speakers is significant, it is the established status of Arabic as a “complementary” code in Chaldean and Assyrian in-group interactions that accounts for why informants view Arabic as one of their languages alongside their L1, and, to a lesser extent, English. Desire for language maintenance applies chiefly to informants' L1, but also to Arabic, confirmed by data showing informants' practices in maintaining both codes and positive affective responses to them both. In contrast, informants express distance towards Kurdish. The connections between this pattern of language maintenance and attitudes and the social and political situation of the emigrants in Iraq and Australia will be discussed.