Diyarbakir Institute for Political and Social Research (DİSA) continue its researches and studies on the Use of Mother Tongue in Education. In this respect, the program named Advocacy for Mother Tongue in Education has been prepared to ensure the Use of Kurdish as Mother Tongue in Education. For this aim, a series of multilingual brochures named Mother Tongue First will be published to raise the public awareness and to enrich the current discussions based on sound data. The first of these bilingual brochures has already been published in Kurdish and Turkish sharing the same name with the series Mother Tongue First. Within this first brochure, topics such as the importance of the use of mother tongue in education, the relationship between mother tongue-based education and gender, revolutionary education, language policies and practices, linguistic interdependence, economic aspects of bilingual education and linguistic biodiversity have been covered through the abridged articles by worldwide known experts. We are happy to share this work of us with you. Click here.

When I first started school next to children whose mother tongue was Kurdish, there were also students who spoke Turkish. They generally were the children of civil servants. I must have envied them. When you are little you are not conscious of these things. What is it like to envy the language of other people? It’s really tragic. You say things like I wish I was born like that and I didn’t encounter these problems. You feel excluded. It’s a completely different psychological state.

This is how a Kurdish student expresses his experience of early school days and its enduring influence. The book, Scar of Tongue, is the outcome of a qualitative research conducted through the assessment of a wide range of sampling. Rather than simply seeing the use of mother tongue in education as a human right, the study seeks to explore how Kurds and Kurdish children in particular, have been affected by the state policies regarding language and education in Turkey in the absence of this basic human right and necessity. In other words, it is an attempt to better understand the linguistic, educational, psychological, social and political destructions of banning Kurdish language as a mother tongue in education in Turkey and to contribute to precautions aimed at eliminating those destructions. Click here