Dilan Roshani

The Kurdish Academy of Language Network

Abstract

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous political entity administering the Iraqi Kurdistan, is celebrating its 20th anniversary as the first lasting Kurdish administrative establishment of the last 150 years. This region is home to an estimated 4-5 million Kurds who share a common identity and culture, but who also speak a great variety of dialects of the Kurdish language. In view of this linguistic diversity, the KRG is facing many difficulties in language-planning and education. Despite the existence of many pioneer works and call by scholars for a practical unified writing system as a measure to meet the dialectal diversity in a well formulated language planing, the issue has become an unfortunate battle filed for Kurdish Face. Since the early 1920s there has been an illusive search for the "superior dialect," and "preferred writing system" to represent the Kurdish Language in all its forms and dialects, in the region. Doubtlessly, the Kurdish language needs to develop a standard form to offer a common ground to its divers speakers with their myriad local dialects. This paper provides a concise overview of various possible approaches to the language issue in Kurdistan while offering a new solution for creation of a standard Kurdish writing system to suite any electronic medium bridging the Kurdish dialectal varieties.

Keywords: Kurdish, Unified Alphabet, Yekgirtú, Standards, Computational Linguistic

CITATION:

Roshani, D. (2010), “Nation State building or language planning”, The First KAES Conference on the Kurdish Language, at UCL, CA, USA on 5th Nov 2010 (click to access)