may 15, 2024
We Celebrate the Kurdish Language Day
“The level of development of language expresses the level of development of life,” as Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish people, once put it. In other words, a society’s level of development can be measured by the development of its mother tongue.
When a society looses its mother tongue, it automatically comes under the hegemony of others. Such a society becomes increasingly conquered, assimilated, and left to face extinction. It is obvious that cultures that experience this reality will be doomed to a tragic existence until they are eradicated and that they will never be able to have a meaningful life in terms of morality, ethics, or aesthetics.
Given these realities, language serves both as the collective memory and as the common identity of a society. The development and preservation of ones mother language is closely related to the development and preservation of social memory. The policy to ban language is the point where denial meets genocide. Today, the Kurdish language is being referred to as ‘illegal, unpleasant, and objectionable’. These are policies that seek to eradicate the Kurdish population. Speaking, writing, thinking, and organizing in Kurdish is one way we must resist this genocide. We need to struggle harder than ever to preserve our language. At this moment, fighting against auto-assimilation on a daily basis is just as much the fundamental duty of any Kurd who believes in a free future as it is against assimilation. We must not forget that just as education in the mother tongue is a legitimate right, organizing and taking action in all areas of life to achieve this right is also a legitimate and indispensable right and necessity!
The common saying ‘there is no truth other than language’ highlights how essential language is to a people’s survival. Kurdish language is, in this sense, the ‘xwebûn’1 reality of the Kurdish people. We must preserve our language because it is essential to our survival, our belief in the victory of the struggle, and our obligation to history and our people.
Our language is being targeted for eradication through the deployment of special warfare and other brutal tactics. Wherever our people are, they should actively struggle for the protection of mother tongue education, the removal of limitations to the use of the mother tongue in public settings, and the refusal to submit to assimilationist policies. Speaking and writing in Kurdish should be seen by our people as the most fundamental act of immortalizing the mother tongue.
On May 15, the 92nd anniversary of the founding of Hawar Magazine, we celebrate Kurdish language day and honor our people for refusing to submit to assimilation and denial policies. We also honor Celadet Ali Bedirxan2 and his colleagues for their tireless efforts in keeping the Kurdish language alive and developing it, and we once again wish all peoples, but especially our own, a happy Kurdish language celebration.
KCK Education Committee
Footnotes:
1 ‘Xwebûn’ is Kurdish and is one of the basic principles of the Kurdish freedom movement. It literally means ‚being oneself‘ and stands for the constant struggle of an individual, a group, or a society to explore their own identity and history and to shape their own lives accordingly.
2 Celadet Ali Bedirxan was a Kurdish pioneer who stood up for Kurdish identity and language, played a crucial role in the so-called Ararat Uprising of 1926 and was involved in the publication of various Kurdish-language newspapers.