“My child does not speak Kurdish well.” A Statement We Hear Kurdish Parents Repeat On Daily Basis

By: Payam Azeez Hussein

Languages are a significant part of us, of our past, and of our future. Languages are not only means of communication; rather, they are our identities. Thus, linguists and educators worldwide have always shed light on the importance of an individual's mother tongue and its relation to our identities.

However, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, we are currently in a tight situation where parents, educators, and most stakeholders prefer English Medium Instruction (EMI) schools for the young generation to enroll in, which is a system that focuses solely on using the English language at all times while completely ignoring the learners' first language. This is why you can find children aged 6–12 speaking fluent English at home, school, or on TV, but if you ask these same children to write an essay in Kurdish, read a poem, or have a conversation with a monolingual Kurd, they will have difficulty performing any of these tasks because using Kurdish is considered "not important" or "useless" to people around these children.

Similarly, we often hear parents proudly confessing that their children's Kurdish proficiency is below average, making it sound as a huge accomplishment. Likewise, private schools in KRI are forcing their students to speak "only English" inside the school as an excuse for better academic performance, but this behavior produces an unfavorable impression of the child’s first language.

Such actions from stakeholders and the Kurdish people could lead to language death and an identity crisis among Kurds in the region and across the globe. Thus, for us to keep our identities and our languages alive, we must teach our kids and the younger generation to love their mother tongues and to embrace their linguistic and cultural differences. As such, we must raise awareness about the importance of languages among parents and educators in KRI to be able to preserve our language and get involved in international education.