A break or continuity? Turkey’s politics of Kurdish language in the new millennium

Abstract

In a court case against Kurdish politicians and activists in 2011, the Turkish judge asked the clerk to write: ‘‘It is understood that the defendant spoke in an unknown language.’’ This was the first time Kurdish was referred to as a language in Turkish court records. Previously, it had been recorded as ‘‘unknown sounds.’’ This ‘‘progress’’ from sounds to language occurred at a time when the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) claimed to have changed the state’s conventional approach to languages other than Turkish. This progress coincided with the government’s Kurdish ‘‘opening,’’ which included an official TV channel broadcasting in Kurdish, Kurdish language and literature departments at tertiary level, elective Kurdish courses in secondary schools, etc. Both neo-conservative and liberal circles in Turkey celebrate these as groundbreaking reforms. Yet, the majority of the Kurds and the Kurdish political movement consider them as simple lip services due to their context, content, form and practice as well as the ongoing violent repression of Kurdish political struggles, which I detail later. Even Turkish liberals and those Kurds who were sympathetic to the AKP government are disappointed by its repressive attitude particularly since 2009. Based on these and other debates, I argue that the limited reforms regarding Kurdish linguistic rights in last few years do not constitute a break with conventional state policies; rather they perpetuate the same Turkish hegemonic domination by other means. As Harun Ercan details in this forum, the existence of a Kurdish problem in Turkey is a by-product of the political ontology of Turkish nation-state that has excluded all non-Turkish peoples of a vast geography across Thrace, Anatolia and Kurdistan. This still intact founding ontology structures the field within which the politics of Kurdish language takes place. Until a radical change in this founding