Kurdish Affairs analyst Mutlu Civiroglu, who teaches Kurdish at universities in the United States such as the University of Arizona, and recently Stratford University, said Turkey’s reaction is “sad to see.”
“Turkey should be happy about Kurdish being taught at prestigious universities,” he told Kurdistan 24.
According to Civiroglu, there is now a “strong interest” among Ph.D. students, government officials, and others who want to learn Kurdish especially after the Kurds’ success against the so-called Islamic State, especially by Syrian Kurds.
“In Japan, the Japanese people want to learn the Kurdish language and culture,” he added. “It’s a linguistic course; it’s nothing political, and nothing threatening.”
Turkish remains the sole official language in Turkey as the Kurds – who number over 20 million – and other ethnic groups continue to demand education in their mother tongue.
In Turkey, successive governments have imposed outright bans or suppression to a high extent on the Kurdish language, spoken in the three forms of Kurmanji, Zazaki, and Sorani (present in central Anatolia) throughout most of the 20th century Turkey since the republic’s foundation in 1923.
Despite a gradual ease since the early 1990s, the lifting of a ban on Kurdish names in 2000, and further liberalization under the rule of a young Justice and Development Party (AKP) including the opening of a Kurdish-language government channel in 2009, the government has reverted to former practices.
Since the failed military coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AKP in 2016, authorities have shuttered scores of Kurdish language institutes, dailies, websites, TVs, including a cartoon channel for kids that was later allowed to re-air, and other media networks.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany