European Parliament and the EU countries are claiming that Turkish government is not allowing Kurds to speak their own language, have education in their own language and live in their own culture. They are advocating that use of Kurdish language should be free as an ethnic right if Turkiye wants the Kurdish issue resolved. The EU members see Kurdish as the main ingredient of the peoples living in Eastern and South Eastern Anatolia. Some newspaper columnists in Turkiye, fearing the internationalisation of the PKK issue, have started suggesting that education in Kurdish should be accepted immediately in order to enable Turkiye to defend herself in Europe.
A friend of mine sent me a copy of a letter by Goichi Kojima published in 'Le Monde' on 30 November 1998. Turkish public does not know the famous Japanese linguist Kojima that well. Kojima speaks Turkish without an accent. He also speaks 25 more languages with their songs and tales. He is capable of learning a new language every three months. I have the copy of a report dated 11.9.1986 that he prepared about the languages spoken in Turkiye. He was a lecturer at University of Lyon. He handed the report over to the then Consul General of Lyon, Mr Ozcan Davaz. We have not been able to disclose the contents of the report to the public until today, fearing terrorist reprisals from PKK. Now that Mr Kojima disclosed himself in a letter to Le Monde, we can start discussing the report.
Mr Kojima, after years of research, determined in 1985 that the number of languages and dialects spoken in 80% of Turkiye was 56. Assuming that the similar number is projected into the 20% of the total area that he has not visited, he assumed that the number in the country would be around 70. That many languages on the size of Turkiye were extraordinary. According to Kojima, it is not appropriate to talk about the existence of a Kurdish language. There are groups of Kurdish. In this group, Zaza and Kirmanci are two separate languages. That is, Zaza is not a segment of Kurdish. When one compares the fundamental vocabularies of Zaza and Kirmanci, there are no common words - not even one. Besides, Zaza is divided into three and Kirmanci is divided into six separate dialects within themselves. The people speaking these dialects can not understand each other as if each one is an independent foreign language. Kojima determined that Kirmanci dialects change every 40-50 Km, producing 50 different Kirmanci variations in all. He believes the rugged landscape contributed to the creation of this situation. Kojima says he attempted to read passages written in Suleymaniye Kirmanci - which is the only written form of Kirmanci - to many people in Anatolia but nobody understood what he was talking about. He indicates that Kirmanci dialects are not suitable for use in education because they lack necessary vocabulary. In order to be able to use Kirmanci as an educational language, one has to load it with Turkish words and teach it in Kirmanci regions as a foreign language.
I invited Kojima to Turkiye and asked him if he could prepare a group of textbooks for use in secondary schools. He smiled and said that there are sub groups under the main dialects which differ greatly from each other. I asked what we can do to alleviate the criticism directed to Turkiye from our European partners. The only solution he offered was the establishment of local TV stations that broadcast common folk songs to regional towns and villages.
This is the Kurdish language issue. Dedicated to the European Parliament and Turkish-Kurdish separatists