Linguists, academics of north Syria’s Kobani evaluate Kurdish language
KOBANI, Syria (North Press) – On the occasion of the Kurdish Language Day, the University of Kobani held on Sunday a discussion panel in the Kurdish city of Kobani in northern Syria.
May 15 marks the Kurdish Language Day. It was first celebrated in 2006. On this day in 1932, the first Kurdish magazine was printed in Latin alphabet in the Syrian capital, Damascus. The magazine was named Hawar (Help in English) by its founder Celadet Ali Bedirxan, a Kurdish writer and journalist.
“The discussion panel evaluated and criticized major subjects on the Kurdish language,” said Shervan Muslim, the co-chair of the University of Kobani.
The University of Kobani was opened in 2017 by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
Many academics from outside the AANES-held areas and Syria participated in the discussion panel via Zoom app.
“The participants transparently criticized the weak situation of the Kurdish language, because the institutions of the AANES are still messaging in the Arabic,” Muslim added.
The Autonomous Administration was first formed in 2014 in the Kurdish-majority regions of Afrin, Kobani and Jazira in northern Syria following the withdrawal of the government forces. Later, it was expanded to Manbij, Tabqa, Raqqa, Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) defeated ISIS militarily.
For over decades, the Syrian government, especially after the Baath Party took power in 1963, prohibited the Kurds from learning or speaking their mother language. It even adopted the system of Arabization, where it turned the names of the towns and villages from Kurdish to Arabic.
Muslim noted the weakness of the education process because of the lack of academics and specialists in the Kurdish language.
Hiwa Salman, a linguist from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRG) who participated in the discussion panel, talked about the KRG’s experiment on the Kurdish language.
Ibrahim Seydo Aydogan, a Europe-based linguist from Turkey who also participated in the panel, presented his own ideas on how to develop the Kurdish language in the AANES areas.