This article addresses Young Turk language policy towards Kurdish in the interwar period. It argues that most Young Turk nationalists treated Turkey’s Kurdish minority as assimilable raw ethnic material, as a result of which Kurds became the object of large-scale cultural and linguistic policies aimed at “Turkification”. This article charts how these language policies infringed upon Kurdish life. It will (a) briefly introduce the Young Turk cultural revolution of 1913–1950, (b) discuss how the Young Turk dictatorship perceived the Turkish language as a vehicle for cultural assimilation, and (c) provide a detailed account of one ex–ample of a boarding school for Kurdish children. It concludes that there is evidence that a policy of cultural genocide against Kurds was implemented but relativizes its impact by discussing the Kurds’ ambivalent reception of those policies
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Turkey’s Kurdish language policy
This article examines the Turkish state’s assimilationist policy towards the Kurds and the Kurdish language in Turkey. It studies how the Turkish nationalist elites, the Kemalists, have throughout the 20th century systematically suppressed the Kurdish language as part of their aim to construct a homogenous nation-state of Turkish speakers. It shows that this linguicidal policy was strongly informed by the traumatic collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent Kemalist emphasis on complete ethno-linguistic homogeneity as criteria for being “Turkish”, “Western” and “civilised”. The article discusses the various “Turkification” strategies of the authorities, such as banning the Kurdish language, the denial of the existence of the Kurds, changing the names of towns and villages, the forced resettlement of Kurds and the assimilation of Kurdish children. It critically analyses the recent developments in Turkey’s Kurdish language policy and the reform efforts of the current government as part of the country’s EU candidacy. The article reflects however, that whilst looking good on paper, these reforms have had little impact in reality and Kurdish speakers in Turkey are still systematically denied their basic human and linguistic rights.
Modernity and the linguistic genocide of Kurds in Turkey
Zygmunt Bauman, Alexander Laban Hilton and Paul Havemann, amongst others, have argued that genocide is intimately linked to modernity. Modern discourses on development, modernization and western science as well as key meta-narratives of modernity (advancing the teleological myth of progress and civilization), “gardener’s visions” and the very categorization and standardization of national languages (crucial to the biopolitical formation of global populations under the system of modern nation-states) have all legitimated and effected policies and practices that have been genocidal in their nature and scope. This article examines and details the extent to which all these identified aspects of modernity can be observed in the case of Turkey. The findings indicate that linguistic/cultural and physical genocide of Kurds in Turkey has taken place (over the past eight and a half decades) as a direct consequence of the Kemalist/Ataturkist modernity project. Language policy – which has advocated linguistic imperialism alongside linguistic genocide – has been a critical tool for the creation of the modern Turkish nation-state.