Pluralism and purist approach in the standardization of minority languages:
the case of Kurmanji Kurdish
Presenter(s)
Affiliation
Topic
Dialectology and Standardization
Type
Papers
Abstract
Kurdish is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 40 million people across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The fragmentation of the Kurdish population across multiple countries and the absence of national standardization institutions have hindered the emergence of a unified language. The two main varieties, Kurmanji and Sorani, have developed separately in terms of standardization. Kurmanji is spoken by the majority of Kurds in Turkey and Syria, as well as by parts of Kurds in Iraq and Iran, whereas Sorani is spoken exclusively by a portion of Kurds in Iraq and Iran. The standardization of Sorani, which became, alongside Arabic, an official language of Iraq in 2005, has been supported by institutions and academies in Iraqi Kurdistan. This has not been the case for Kurmanji, whose standardization efforts, due to its sociolinguistic unfavorable situation, have been driven by speakers, activists, and advocates.
Two main trends characterize these standardization efforts: on one hand, a pluralistic and inclusive approach to the variation within Kurmanji, and on the other, a purist and normative approach. Advocates of the former emphasize the richness of linguistic variation and warn against the risk of creating a double diglossic situation by imposing a single standard (Gal 2006). Proponents of the latter adhere to an essentialist view of language, perceiving languages as uniform or monolithic entities. Furthermore, they are influenced by the ideology of a standard as a singular norm (Bourdeau 2021), as well as by the nation-state models and their language policies, which often promote monolingualism.
In this presentation, we aim to explore the ideological assumptions and linguistic arguments underpinning these two approaches by describing the variation that constitutes a fundamental characteristic of Kurmanji and will be illustrated through examples in syntax, lexicon, and orthography, while also considering the language’s ongoing evolution.
