The Kurds, who live across the world, have celebrated the ‘Kurdish Language Day’ on May 15 to honour the Kurdish language which has been oppressed especially in Turkey for decades. The day is celebrated as proposed by Kurdish literary scholars and linguists to contribute to the development of Kurdish language.
The German Democratic Kurdish Community Center (NAV-DEM) has issued a written statement on the occasion of Kurdish Language Day and underlined that the Turkish state has carried out all sorts of different plans in order to deny not only Kurds but their language and culture.
The statement also accused the policies pursued by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government led by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of annihilation of Kurds and Kurdish culture.
“A people’s freedom can only be possible if this people’s language is free. And the freedom of a language can only be achieved through the abolition of all obstacles to its use, in daily life education, communication-publishing to organizing and politics, to the free use of all areas. Otherwise a language deprived of these possibilities exists in conditions of heavy oppression and assimilation and will have difficulties to survive,” said the statement.
NAV-DEM urged all the people, mainly women and young people, to speak their mother tongue and stated that “We call upon our people to resist against the racist-fascist groups, that despise and insult the Kurdish language. We need to protect our national existence and culture against all those who attack Kurdish youths because they speak or sing in Kurdish.”
Meanwhile, Sami Tan, the President of the Kurdish Institute, the rate of reading and writing in Kurdish has increased while the rate of speaking the language decreased. Tan emphasized the needs for parents to speak Kurdish with their children since they are very little to allow the development of the language.
Speaking to Mesopotamia news agency Tan underlined that the Kurdish language has no status in Turkey and being considered as a dialect. Recalling that the AKP in the past used some election posters written in Kurdish, Tan said that “They tried to use Kurdish in the election posters, but they ended up being ashamed of it as a big portion of them did not actually know it. In this election process though because of the nationalistic mentality of the MHP and the denial policy of the State of Emergency, they will not use any Kurdish. In fact, at the moment, only the HDP uses Kurdish in election propaganda material, nobody else.”
Tan also stated that in many schools in the region, Kurdish students are in fact being prevented from speaking Kurdish. “You can actually see the note on the boards, saying ‘I will not speak Kurdish’,” he said.
“Clearly 90 years of denial and assimilation policies against the Kurdish language, and even its violent repression, increased insecurity among the Kurdish society. The attempts to break the will of the society gave some results. How did this come about? The new generation of the society is slowly breaking away from the language, especially when people don’t speak with their own children in Kurdish. A generation later the breach becomes clearer… Auto-assimilation has acquired an important role. We can see this, when we look at the society especially from a sociolinguistic point of view: The rate of spoken Kurdish has decreased while Kurdish literacy rate has increased. This is a situation caused by auto-assimilation,” said Tan.
The Kurdistan Communities Union’s (KCK) Education Committee has also issued a written statement and said that “Each society shapes its existence and its sociality in its own language. This universal reality is also valid for the people of Kurdistan.”
The post Kurdish people celebrates ‘Kurdish Language Day’ across the world appeared first on Stockholm Center for Freedom.
from Stockholm Center for Freedom https://stockholmcf.org/27577-2/
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