For much of the Republic’s history, Kurdish was excluded from public education and official institutions, while place names were changed and the education system was built around a monolingual model. As a result, Kurdish never became a normal part of formal schooling.
The consequences are now measurable. While 45% of respondents say they understand Kurdish “very well” and 37.5% say they speak it fluently, literacy tells a different story.
Only 23.2% say they can read Kurdish very well, and just 17% report being able to write it fluently. Meanwhile, 27.5% cannot read Kurdish at all, and 36.6% cannot write in their mother tongue.
The findings reveal a structural problem: when a language is excluded from schools, institutions, and written media, it survives primarily as a spoken language and gradually loses its written tradition.
The home is no longer a safe haven
The most striking finding concerns language use at home.
In 2020, nearly 69.4% of respondents reported regularly speaking Kurdish at home. By 2026, that figure had fallen to 45.1%—a decline of more than 24 percentage points in just six years.
This trend threatens the intergenerational transmission of Kurdish. If children do not grow up hearing and speaking the language at home, the community’s ability to pass it on to future generations weakens dramatically.
Political pressure and fear
Researchers attribute much of this decline to long-standing restrictions on mother-tongue education, political pressure, and the shrinking space for Kurdish-language institutions.
Following the appointment of government trustees to elected municipalities and the closure of many Kurdish cultural institutions, fear has deepened within society. More than 60% of respondents say they worry about facing discrimination for speaking Kurdish in public institutions or on digital platforms. As a result, many parents increasingly choose to speak Turkish with their children.
A sharp generational divide
The survey also highlights a dramatic generational shift.
Among people aged 65 and older, nearly 78% actively speak Kurdish. Among young adults aged 18 to 24, that figure drops to just 34.1%.
Perhaps the most worrying statistic concerns early childhood: roughly one in four children between the ages of 0 and 5 does not hear Kurdish spoken at home.
The risks beyond language
The decline of Kurdish is more than a linguistic issue. It threatens cultural continuity, collective identity, and social cohesion.
As fewer young people speak Kurdish, identity may become increasingly symbolic rather than lived through everyday language. The loss of Kurdish also puts oral traditions, folklore, and historical memory at risk, as these have long been passed down from one generation to the next through the language itself.
A widening language gap between older and younger generations may weaken family and community ties. Meanwhile, continued urbanization and the shrinking use of Kurdish in daily life risk confining the language to ever smaller social spaces.
Together, these trends suggest that preserving Kurdish is not only about saving a language, but also about safeguarding the cultural memory and social fabric it sustains.
Strong public demand, no institutional support
Despite these challenges, public support for Kurdish-language education remains overwhelming.
Between 2020 and 2026, more than 97% of respondents consistently said they want children to receive education in Kurdish. Yet the absence of comprehensive mother-tongue education and the limited availability of Kurdish-language schooling continue to prevent the development of literacy and long-term language transmission.
Linguists warn that unless meaningful institutional support is introduced within the coming decade, the erosion of Kurdish language use may become increasingly difficult to reverse.
This article is an adapted and expanded version of a report by Rûstem Sîncar, originally published in ANF Kurdish.
