Maintaining linguistic diversity through multilingual education

Abstract

This paper focuses on the educational system of two states with different cultural backgrounds. On the one hand, this paper examines the current situation of Sami teaching in Finland and on the other hand, it describes the development of Kurdish education in Turkey. Through this paper I point out how education in minority languages can contribute to the maintenance of linguistic diversity in the above mentioned multilingual societies. In the multilingual Sápmi area the existing linguistic relationships are constantly changing, while the concept of linguistic diversity is redefined. In the last half decade, Turkey began taking into account the reality of multilingualism of the linguistically heterogeneous state. Today there are several possibilities to study the Kurdish language as a mother tongue.

Keywords

• finland
• turkey
• sami
• kurd
• minority languages in education
• linguistic diversity