Diyarbakir’s Dicle University Launching International Kurdish Academic Journal

ANKARA, Turkey – Dicle University in Diyarbakir is launching a journal and website to help introduce Kurdish social sciences and international studies to the world.

“Everything about Kurdish and Kurds will be included in this journal,” said Assistant Professor Hasan Karacan, who heads the university’s department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, and is editor and founder of the journal.

“We aim at contributing to the Kurdish language, history and literature through this project,” he told Rudaw.

Karacan said that, alongside Kurdish, the journal would also be published in English, Turkish and Russian, with Arabic coming soon.

“We saw that such a project was needed in academia so we decided to publish an international journal to fill this gap,” said Karacan, explaining it would be available in print and online, at www.ijoks.com.

Karacan said that the university will offer elective courses in Kurdish grammar, with books printed by the Kurdology department of St. Petersburg University in the 1950s.

“Submitted articles will be reviewed by academics from Turkey and abroad,” explained Karacan. “The articles will be published in the language that they are written. We want the journal and website to be multilingual. Russian and English submissions will be translated into Turkish and Kurdish.”

Karacan explained that the project is a daunting task that will need the assistance of many a skilled researcher.

“We still have so much to do,” he said. “We know that there are Kurdish inscriptions that date back to a very long time ago. Those inscriptions should be searched out. We also know that the number of trained researchers is not sufficient. We would like to contribute to training new researchers and presenting the hidden literary works to the people.”

Founders of the journal are drawing from the experience of Central Asian republics, which split from the Soviet Union two decades ago and have been trying ever since to promote their own national languages.

“Providing education in mother tongue is not easy,” said Karacan. “I have been to Turkic republics and observed their own experiences. They declared independence from the Soviet regime in 1992 and started education in their native language, but they still haven’t been able to fully achieve it in 22 years.”

Karacan said that there lie many legal and educational barriers for the Kurdish language in Turkey that need to be removed before teachers and academics can fully engage on this project.

Dr. Kadri Yildirim, head of the Kurdology Department of Mardin Artuklu University, told Rudaw that the decision to start the journal is a positive step. He explained that the Kurdish language is coming into academia for the first time in Turkey. Language specialists should be evaluated and “reviewed objectively and sufficiently,” he said.

“The first and most urgent step to be taken by the government in order to provide education in Kurdish is to recognize this right of the Kurds and put it in a legal and constitutional framework,” added Yildirim.

Zilver Ilhan, a Kurdish writer and academic at Mardin Artuklu’s Kurdology department, said the new journal could revive the Kurdish language and connect Kurdish academics across the world.

“What is expected from such journals is to display the most important and urgent problems of the Kurdish language and offer solutions,” said Ilhan.