One year since the quake:

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Linguicide and resilience of the Kurdish language

The ground is no longer shaking, but the Kurdish language remains at risk.

چیتر زەوی نالەرزێ، بەڵام زمانی کوردی لە مەترسیدا ماوەتەوە.

Êdî erd naheje, lê zimanê kurdî di bin xeterê de ye.

The 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake has long exited the news, but the deadly impacts of language violence in Kurdish communities – which preceded this natural disaster – continue today.

Last February’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria killed over 50,000 people; injured, displaced, or left unhoused more than 15.7 million people; and destroyed over 345,000 homes, mostly belonging to Kurdish civilians in eastern Turkey and northern Syria.

Emergency resources were immediately released for impacted communities and translated into several languages – but largely not into Kurdish, despite the fact that Kurdish-majority regions were most damaged in the quake. Kurdish-speaking communities had almost no access to crucial information and emergency aid in their mother tongue.

This language violence is just a recent manifestation of decades of language violence toward Kurdish communities throughout Kurdistan.

In response to the lack of Kurdish-language resources after the earthquake, Respond's Kurdish team began to reach out and offer support to affected communities. Beyond direct service work to ensure that urgently needed resources were available in different dialects of Kurdish, Respond also launched a project to delve into the ongoing linguicide of Kurdish.

Respond’s Kurdish team conducted interviews and collected stories about the far-reaching impacts of language violence against Kurds throughout all regions of Kurdistan, from Rojava and Rojhelat to Bakur and Bashur (the Syrian-occupied, Iranian-occupied, Turkish-occupied and semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan within the internationally recognized state of Iraq, respectively).

In this series, we feature the testimonies of a dozen Kurdish speakers in Kurdistan and diaspora. We uncover the difficulties of Kurdish language access during the 2023 earthquake and other disasters. We explore the notion of Kurdish language as Kurdish identity and dive into the history of anti-Kurdish policy and Kurdish genocide that led to these recent events. We also share stories of discrimination and forced assimilation of Kurdish people; language violence experienced in school; and efforts and demands to protect the language from extinction.

The timeliness of our efforts to collect this testimony cannot be understated. The Kurdish language continues to be at risk through de jure and de facto state policies that aim to suppress ethnic and linguistic rights and via incessant attacks on Kurdish homelands. As we write this introduction, Kurdistan continues to suffer the consequences of anti-Kurdish policy. Just weeks ago, in early January of 2024, the governments of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey bombed Bashur and Rojava, claiming, among many lives, the life of an 11-month-old infant named Jîna (meaning life in Kurdish) Peshraw Dizayee. Tragedies such as these are just one of many ways Kurdish peoples are suppressed through systems of discrimination and suppression described throughout this compendium of lived experiences – systems that threaten not only the linguistic diversity of the region, but the very soul of Kurdish identity itself.

- Raman Salah, Respond Crisis Translation Kurdish Team Lead, February 2024

This storytelling project by Respond Crisis Translation presents the six-month-long community research of Raman Salah, Respond’s Kurdish Language Team Lead. To inquire about the project, please contact raman@respondcrisistranslation.org. Respond Policy Director Leila Lorenzo and Arabic Team Lead Ayah Najadat contributed to this project.

“Language is not reducible to a simple tool for communication; language is also home to our existence. Through language someone can feel his or her very existence. Language is one of the most important pieces of cultural material that enables a nation’s identity to survive eradication.”

– Kurdish artist and writer Halgurd Baram

TESTIMONIES

QUOTE SECTION EXAMPLE

“One of the most beautiful things I remember about her was when she said, ‘Teacher, I will learn Kurdish better.’

They could not stay here. They said that Malatya was more beautiful than here and they did not want to stay here. There are many reasons for this. The biggest reason was that they were ‘Kurds.’ It made them feel helpless in this foreign city and it would also cause them to lose their own identity. Knowing that this would result in a horrible life, they could not stay here and returned to Malatya.”

- Jiyan, Kurmanji speaker and teacher in Bakur (name changed to protect privacy)

"My first memory of which I felt really oppressed was seeing my grandfather digging a hole in our garden in front of our house. He put the gramophone and all the disks into the hole, then covered it with dirt and laid a carpet on it. I didn't understand! I was questioning, why is my grandfather doing that? While I was questioning my grandmother, she was encouraging him to hurry, she had an anxious voice, and I was told not to say anything. Especially not talk in Kurmanji! But we don't speak Turkish!”

- Sevim Zelal Tonbul, Kurmanji speaker in Bakur, Turkish-occupied Kurdistan

“My native dialect was Mukriyanî, a sub-dialect of Central Kurdish, and it held official status in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan due to its rich literary history. After our village was tragically bombed by Turkish fighter jets, we were forced to flee to the city and rebuild our lives. This was essentially a fresh start, albeit under much harsher circumstances. Nostalgia for our previous life began to swell within me, and I couldn't help but reflect on how we survived such a catastrophe, known as the Zargally Massacre. During my teenage years, I started to appreciate my language even more deeply and began to wonder how such an ancient treasure of humanity could be so overlooked by the world.”

- Dewran Mahmud, Sorani, Kurmanji, and Kelhorî speaker living in Bashur

“In the city’s universities, professors explain everything in Arabic, although half of students are Kurdish, and this makes it a big difficulty for them to understand what they are studying. Therefore, Kurdish parents have started to send their children to Arabic schools to make studying at university easier for them. This may not seem like a big issue for most people, but it is!”

- Sarah Ali Mohammed Amin, 22-year-old Sorani speaker in Bashur

"I was asking my parents about the situation back when they were in school. I remember they were telling me about how they were beaten up for speaking Kurdish. This is always an example that I highlight. It might sound very simple – ‘okay, you don’t speak the country’s language’ – but it means this violence starts at a very young age, and this is where the first step of assimilation starts.”

- Rojda Arslan, Kurmanji and Zazakî speaker living in Germany

Featured

The role of anti-Kurdish language violence in the devastation of the 2023 earthquake

By Raman Salah

One effect of linguicide – the calculated destruction of a language – is that during times of disaster and emergency, government response and relief measures like critical information and outreach are not accessible in a language that many of the people most affected by the crisis can understand.

Histories and geographies of Kurdish suppression

By Leila Lorenzo, Raman Salah

The Kurdish language is the 40th most spoken language among the world’s 7,000 languages.

Kurdish speakers are dispersed across borders, leading to diverse linguistic environments shaped by different state policies. There are an estimated 35 million Kurdish speakers representing linguistic minorities spread across five different countries …

Kurdish language as Kurdish identity

By Raman Salah

Kurdish language is part and parcel of Kurdish identity, for many of the people with whom Respond spoke.

“As we say in Kurdish… our language is our identity.” – Gordyaen Jermayi (emphasis added)

Memories of anti-Kurdish discrimination and forced assimilation

By Raman Salah

“This language is my language. As someone whose language has been restricted, banned, prohibited, and many people went to jail and got punished for speaking or writing in, for publishing in it – yeah, definitely, I feel a personal connection to the concept of language violence.” – Berivan*, Sorani speaker in Bashur

Anti-Kurdish language violence in schools

By Raman Salah

While language violence occurs in many contexts, from disaster relief and humanitarian aid to legal, medical, and psychological support, one of the most insidious and intergenerationally significant sites of institutional language violence is the school system.

The fight for Kurdish language survival

By Raman Salah

“I can protect my language from being forgotten by reading and writing, communicating with friends and family in my mother tongue.” Tavge*, a teacher, translator, and Kurmanji speaker from Rojava

Kurdish people in their daily lives and in their relationship with their stories, communities, and dialect, are at the forefront of the fight for language justice across Kurdistan.

Click here for our methodology and works cited.