ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Residents of Austria who want to work in or visit the Kurdistan Region are taking Kurdish lessons in order to learn the basics of the Kurdish language.
The majority of students are learning Kurdish and some of them are learning it for years to develop proficiency in the language. The majority are studying Kurmanji Kurdish while the remainings are learning Sorani Kurdish from professional instructors in Vienna.
Yasmin Randalla, a 67-year-old psychologist in Vienna, has decided to learn Kurdish because she has been running humanitarian projects in Iran’s western Kurdish regions (Rojhelat) for several years.
"People in [Kurdistan] don't speak English, so I want to learn Kurdish myself to understand them,” Randalla, a Kurdish language learner, told Rudaw’s Alla Shally on Friday.
Benedict Metsmith, 37, a social anthropology major with many Kurdish friends, wants to learn Kurdish and work in the Kurdistan Region in the future.
“Kurdish culture and language is very interesting,” Metsmith told Rudaw on Friday. “I am very interested in the Middle East and I studied Arabic at university, so I wanted to learn a new language.”
“I want to visit the West and participate in humanitarian projects,” she added.
Hussein Hassan, an instructor from Vienna, has been teaching the Kurdish language for almost 3 years and he has been living in Austria for almost 7 years.
Hassan is one of the instructors that teach students the Kurdish language through an online session twice a week.
The idea of teaching Kurdish at the institute dates back to four years ago when there were only 22 Austrian students. Since then, the number of students has increased year by year, with some of them participating as a hobby while others wanting to learn because of their closeness or family relationships with the Kurds of this country, according to the Rudaw reporter.
Larissa, Alex, and Maria are learning Kurdish out of love for their friends. Sorgul speaks Kurdish herself but wants to improve her reading and writing.
When students complete the first, second, and third language levels, they receive an accredited Kurdish language certificate.
Besides the increasing demand for learning the Kurdish language abroad, foreigners in the Kurdistan Region have also expressed an increasing interest in learning the language over the past years.
Educators have also taken it upon themselves to voluntarily teach the Kurdish population their mother tongue in Rojhelat.
