Mother tongue and the Constitution
As of today, the majority of the Kurdish population is in an agreement that the usage of mother tongue in education has become a “sine qua non” The new constitution has a close correlation with the Kurdish issue. So much so that, one cannot pos ...
“If the state tells us to disarm…”
Village guards threaten. An article of Bahar Kılıçgedik of Taraf newspaper reports that Diyarbakır Institute for Political and Social Research (DISA) recently published their research on the village guard system as a book. The book entitled A Param ...
Books for the wounds of mother tongue
“Education in Mother Tongue and Minority Rights”, “Minorities and the Right to Education in Mother Tongue in International Law” and “The Mother Tongue Wound” are only a few examples of contemporary books that address languages in danger and their po ...
Can you heal a language wound?
Diyarbakır Institute for Social and Political Research’s commissioned book “Language Wound: Turkey’s Problem of Not Using Mother Tongue in Education” was co-authored by three academicians and contains narratives of students, educators as well as par ...
Mandatory Turkish puts Kurdish pupils at disadvantage
In a village in eastern Turkey at 8.30 in the morning, around 20 children gather outside a small square building for the daily anit, the student pledge: "I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hardworking." It is cold, and some of the smaller children sh ...