Colonial Language Legacies: The Prospects for Kurdish

Abstract

There is massive documentation of the oppression of the Kurds: scholarly books, personal and governmental accounts, and regular documentation of human rights abuses. Questions are asked in the European Parliament. The Council of Europe regularly investigates torture in one of its member states, Turkey. The Kurds even had a high media profile in the months following the Gulf war. Yet their desperate situation continues, despite the awareness of the international community, and even though the Kurdish right to self-determination, however it is defined, has been convincingly argued.¹ This paper will not rehearse these familiar arguments, but will concentrate on how the oppression of the Kurdish language is outstandingly severe, and on the importance of language rights for liberation. It will also consider whether the language policies of many states which were formerly colonies represent an example to follow.

Language is the most important indicator of Kurdish identity. The right to have native-tongue education and medias has been the most important demand of Kurdish nationalism in the post-World War I period. In their attempt to survive linguistic genocide, Kurdish intellectuals, political activists and religious leaders struggled for the development of a unified national language. (Hassanpour, 1992)

This article draws heavily on two articles from Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination (1994) (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, eds), namely the article by Skutnabb-Kangas and Bucak on Kurdish and one by Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas on language rights in postcolonial Africa, which in turn draws on Phillipson (1992). A recent volume on the oppression of the Kurds is Chaliand (1992). Regular documentation of human rights abuses is available, in English or German, from the International Association for Human Rights in Kurdistan, Postfach 104551, W-2800 Bremen 1, Germany.