The Kurds Need a Common Language

Rastinews — A common language is one every member of a nation can understand. The Kurds have a single language with five dialects: Kurmanji, Zazaki (Kirmancki), Sorani (or Gorani), Laki (or Hewrami), and Lori (or Kelhori). Beyond the dialects lie countless local accents. As a result, Kurds from different regions often cannot understand one another. A common language has become as essential to us as bread and water.

To be clear, calling for a common language does not mean abandoning our dialects and local accents. Those dialects and accents are the wealth of our language. Each dialect preserves that wealth by holding on to Kurdish words that others have lost, since not every word survives in every dialect; a word alive in one dialect can be absent from another. This shows up most clearly in the arts. The melodies and tunes of Shahrazur, Baban, Erdelan, Hewraman, Behdinan, and Serhed, extending to Dersim, Koçgiri, Semsur, and Maraş, each stir a different feeling, more powerful than the last. Through these regions and dialects, language gives our culture an unmatched richness.

But this diversity creates barriers to comprehension. Without a common language, a people cannot build a shared national consciousness or sensitivity, because comprehension is the key to that consciousness. That is why we need a common language. Beyond these barriers to comprehension, there is another, larger than all the rest: the use of two different alphabets has split our homeland in two. Rojava, Başûr, and Rojhilat write in the Arabic-based alphabet, while Bakur writes in Latin script. Something else matters just as much. Writers in each region use not only different alphabets and different dialects, but different local accents as well. In Rojhilat, for instance, writers in the city of Mahabad use the Sorani dialect with a Mukriyani accent, while in the Hewraman region they use the Laki dialect with a Hewrami accent. In Bakur, writers use the accents of Botan, Serhed, and Mardin.

There is no need to list every region and every accent one by one. The examples above are enough to show how difficult the dialect and accent question really is. We might say the Kurdish language has five orphaned children, motherless. When we call for a common language, we mean one that holds all the dialects within it. We are not asking to give up our dialects, and no force could erase them in any case. Our dialects have existed for thousands of years and will go on existing. Baba Tahir Hamadani, known as "Uryan," one of the forefathers of Kurdish poetry, wrote his verses a thousand years ago in the Laki dialect with a Hewrami accent. Melayê Bateyî wrote in the Kurmanji dialect with a Hakkari accent.

Unfortunately, when book fairs are held in Başûrê Kurdistan, publishers and intellectuals from Bakurê Kurdistan do not take part, because books written in the Kurmanji dialect with Latin script are not sold or read there, owing to the different alphabet and dialect. The same happens in reverse: when book fairs are held in Bakurê Kurdistan, publishers and intellectuals from Rojava, Başûr, and Rojhilat stay away, because books written in their dialects with Arabic script are not sold or read in Bakur. A book fair held recently in Erbil, for example, drew not a single publisher or intellectual from Bakurê Kurdistan.

As I have written before, I will say it again. I had hoped the Kurdistan Region government's education ministry would take up work like this, building a common language. But it shows no interest in the task. I had hoped for this because most countries in the world maintain institutes of language and history. Such institutes work through committees of specialists and scholars, backed by the state and the government; individual effort alone cannot carry this work to a successful conclusion. Yet despite having a government, Başûrê Kurdistan still teaches in Behdinan in the Kurmanji dialect with Arabic script, and in the Sulaymaniyah region in the Sorani dialect with the same script.

I keep asking myself how a language ends up being translated into itself. I doubt any people in the world, apart from us Kurds, does this. Books in our language are unfortunately translated from Sorani into Kurmanji. Writers and intellectuals abroad are left baffled by it. Translation implies two different languages. But we do not have different languages; we have different dialects.

While researching and traveling for my books, I crossed the whole of Başûrê Kurdistan and Rojhilatê Kurdistan, and I collected plenty of stories about our dialects along the way. In the Hewraman district of Rojhilatê Kurdistan, a teacher told me about two brothers who came from Amed. They stayed in Hewraman for two days, and the two sides could not understand a single word of each other's speech. When I traveled to Sulaymaniyah in Başûrê Kurdistan, I ran into a young man from Shengal (Sinjar) and another from Qamishlo. Once we switched to the Kurmanji dialect, I could see how pleased they were and how much closer they suddenly felt to me. That is why I say a common language, and the comprehension it brings, acts as the key to nationhood.

Language, I repeat, is the pillar of nationhood, and that language needs to be a common one. But we still lack the institutions to build it. I hope that one day we will have the institutions I am calling for.