ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkey’s pro-Kurdish political party wants the Kurdish language to be officially recognized in Turkey, the co-chair of the party told Rudaw on Friday, as prospects for an end to the country’s 40-year conflict raise hopes for greater cultural rights.
“Kurds have opened their doors to you, fought alongside you. Now accept Kurdish identity, Kurdish language, and stop fighting against it,” Tuncer Bakirhan, co-chair of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), said during the large celebration of Newroz (the Kurdish New Year) in Diyarbakir (Amed).
Since the establishment of modern Turkey in the early 1920s, the public use of Kurdish - including speaking, publishing, or singing - was at times banned. The current constitution, ratified after a military coup in 1980 and most recently amended in 2017, identifies Turkish as the official language in the country. Restrictions have been eased, including during an earlier peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) a decade ago, but public use of the language remains stigmatized.
Kurds are hopeful that changes may be made after jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan last month called on the group to disarm and disband and take the struggle for Kurdish rights into the political sphere, potentially ending 40 years of conflict.
Mehmet Rustu Tiryaki, a DEM Party member of the Turkish parliament, announced on Friday that they have established a commission to address “lifting the ban on Kurdish language and recognizing the Kurds.”
Under the restrictions on the language, many Kurds in Turkey do not speak their mother tongue. A study by the Socio-Political Field Research Center in May 2024 revealed a sharp decline in the use of Kurdish at home in Turkey, with only 42.2 percent of Kurds regularly speaking the language.
The survey of 1,276 people across 16 provinces found that 18.8 percent of Kurdish families speak only Turkish at home, while 46 percent use both Turkish and Kurdish. Alarmingly, nearly 40 percent of children aged 12-17 cannot speak Kurdish at all, and another 25 percent have only limited proficiency.
Despite this decline, there is a strong demand to preserve the Kurdish language - 99.4 percent of respondents supported efforts to protect and develop Kurdish, while 98.4 percent want their children to be educated in their mother tongue.
The DEM Party held a four-day campaign in February 2024 to promote learning the Kurdish language. Having the MPs wear Kurdish traditional clothing and speak in Kurdish in the parliament were part of the initiative, which was meant to commemorate International Mother Language Day.
The party’s promotional video in Kurmanci and Zazaki - two dialects of the Kurdish language - said they plan to “turn every corner into a university for the Kurdish language.”
“We call for recognizing Kurdish as an official language, and also for it to become the language of education,” the video said.
Sinan Ciftyurek, DEM Party MP for Van province, published a video on social media where he stands next to the Kurdistan flag. “For them to succeed in the eradication of the Kurdish people, they have to start with the eradication of Kurdish language,” he said, adding “We cannot live without our language.”
