Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (Apr 2021)
Kurdish as a Stateless Language in the U.S.
Abstract
This article discusses the status of Kurdish as a stateless language in the U.S. By using intersectionality as the theoretical framework, the article argues that the educational structures of power converge, at Kurds home countries and abroad, to create a set of conditions under which the stateless Kurdish language exists, always in a kind of invisible but persistent multiple jeopardy. The article shows how Kurdish in the U.S., similar to the Middle East, has been merely tolerated, and finds itself excluded from opportunities reserved for languages that enjoy privileges pertaining to statehood, such as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, which have been fostered within academic departments of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern studies, Iranian, Arabic, and Turkish studies. The article examines how available the frameworks of institutions such as the American Council for Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the National Council for Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL), which were initially founded to represent foreign, critical, and less commonly taught language in the U.S., are insufficient for offsetting a stateless language’s intersection and multiple axes of marginalization, statelessness, suppression, discrimination, and soft and hard linguicide. This intersectional status of Kurdish sheds light on examining the wider implications of stateless languages and demands a total recasting and rethinking of existing policy frameworks within federal and higher education institutions regarding stateless languages. Finally, the article further maps the conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as an analytic tool for thinking about operations and interlocking systems of power, here applied to a language for the first time.
