Kurdish Heritage Language Education

Ez li welêt mamoste bûm. Lê piştî 12 Îlonê em ketin hepsê. Hepsê de em hinek kurdî elimîn. [In the homeland, I was a teacher. But after the military coup of September 12, I was imprisoned. It was in prison that we learned Kurdish—literary Kurdish—a little.] (Mamoste Mesud, Kurdish language teacher in Germany, pseudonym)

This testimony comes from an interview I conducted with a Kurdish language teacher in Germany as part of my doctoral research, completed recently at the University of Potsdam. It is not an isolated account. Several other Kurdish language teachers I interviewed, as well as Kurdish political activists told me that prison in Turkey was where they first encountered written Kurdish. The experience recurs with striking regularity across generations and biographies.

Mehmed Uzun (Image credit: UnionsVerlag)

For instance, Mehmed Uzun — one of the most celebrated authors in Kurdish literature — writes in his memoirs that his commitment to literary Kurdish also began during his imprisonment in Turkey in the first half of 1970s. As a resilience strategy, he wrote in no other language than Kurdish until 1985, when his first novel appeared while he was living in exile in Stockholm. There, Mehmed Uzun and a number of other Kurdish intellectuals built a literary legacy that became one of the catalysts for the establishment of Kurdish-language teaching in Swedish schools — the first time Kurdish had been taught in a school setting in Europe. That Swedish experience, in turn, became a key reference point for efforts to maintain and teach Kurdish in other diaspora contexts, particularly in Germany and eventually in Kurdish homeland(s) across Mesopotamia.

Kurds and Kurdish Language Teaching in Germany

Germany is one of the countries where Kurdish has a relatively long history of instruction in school settings. Since 1993, Kurdish has been taught within programs known as Herkunftssprachenunterricht — commonly translated as heritage language education (HLE). These programs are, in fact, one of the few official public domains in Germany where the term “Kurdish” appears at all. This is because Kurds hold no recognized status as a distinct group in German state classifications: they are registered simply as citizens of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, or Syria — or as German citizens with a migration background from those countries. This administrative logic renders the Kurdish community largely invisible in official documents and state discourse, absorbed into national categories that say nothing about language, culture, or identity. And yet, today, around 3,000 students across seven German states are enrolled in Kurdish HLE programs — a quiet but significant presence that the public as well as academic sources barely acknowledges.

Germany is home to the largest Kurdish community in the European diaspora — an estimated 1.5 million people, of whom around 580,000 report Kurdish as their primary language at home, according to national statistics. This community has been shaped over roughly a century by successive waves of political oppression and conflict across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Yet despite this demographic weight — and despite three decades of Kurdish language teaching in German schools — no comprehensive scholarly study of Kurdish heritage language education (KHLE) existed before this research. That is a striking gap, particularly given the relatively rich academic literature on HLE in Germany more broadly.

Map of German states offering Kurdish heritage language education (Image credit: Martin Derince)

Kurdish is also exceptional within that literature in another respect: it is the only stateless language among the 30 languages currently taught in HLE programs in Germany. Unlike the others — most of which were introduced through bilateral agreements between Germany and countries of origin such as Turkey, Greece, and Italy — Kurdish has no state to negotiate on its behalf, no official institutional backing, and no recognized interlocutor within the policy frameworks that govern HLE. The question this raises is not a small one: how, under these conditions, did KHLE programs come to exist and survive at all?

Answering it is what this research set out to do. Over four years of activist ethnographic fieldwork — conducted not from a position of observant participant, but as a researcher explicitly committed to the communities being studied — what emerged was a picture of extraordinary and creative agency. Kurdish teachers, parents, community organizations, and intellectuals had each, in their own way, carved out a space for their language through constant contestation, negotiation, and struggle. It is this agency, and the distinctive dispositions that sustain it, that I eventually conceptualized as Resistance Habitus.

Conceptualizing Resistance Habitus

The concept brings together two theoretical traditions. The first is the literature on resistance — not only in the context of organized social movements, but also in the sense of everyday practices through which people quietly challenge power without open confrontation. The second is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: the durable system of dispositions, shaped by experience, through which individuals and communities perceive and act in the world. From these two traditions I derive the concept of Resistance Habitus, which I define as a historically embedded, socially situated, and durably embodied system of dispositions that orients Kurdish actors toward the sustained pursuit of KHLE as part of a broader struggle for sociopolitical, linguistic, and pedagogical recognition — under conditions of statelessness, institutional marginalization, and exclusion.

No abstract definition captures Resistance Habitus better than the story of someone who lived it. When asked how he came to be a Kurdish language teacher in Germany, Mamoste Mesud recounts:

One Newroz evening, I saw that Mamoste A.B [a Kurdish language activist] had opened a stand there—it was in 1991. He had set up a stand and was standing behind it, talking about education. He said, “We have a small group here, a small community. You could [also join]…” I said, “I was a teacher in the homeland,” and he said, “We’re also looking for a teacher here, join our group.” I said, “Of course, with pleasure.” We had a Kurdish friend, he was from Rojava, and his Kurdish was very good. For two years, we attended his Kurdish courses, to learn grammar. In fact, my main motivation was to learn Kurdish, it wasn’t about becoming a teacher and at that time I already had a job that paid well and took up a lot of my time. Before I became a teacher, I was earning 4,500 Marks in my previous job. Then, I became a teacher and started earning 1,800 Marks. But we made that sacrifice so that Kurdish would be accepted, so that Kurdish would take its place among the international languages, and so that Kurdish would gain dignity. That is why we made this sacrifice.

Mamoste Mesud’s words capture the dispositions of successive generations that viewed language teaching as both political resistance and cultural commitment shaped by a desire to dignify Kurdish, carve out a place for it among world languages, and contribute to its institutional recognition and promotion even if that required sacrifices at many levels.

Not much different from Mamoste Mesud’s trajectory, Mamoste Evdile — a pseudonym for another pioneer of KHLE in Germany — explained how they prepared the very first teaching materials with extremely low resources back in the early 1990s.

I can say so openly, it’s not a shame, our conditions were like that, our circumstances were like that. I had an old typewriter. My kids had found it in garbage. Probably someone had thrown it away and [my kids] took it home. We used it to write with it and then we added the special characters according to the alphabet of the Kurdish language using a pencil. […] I still have those materials. I put them in a file, I still use it. I mean, even if I retire, I will not give them away. I think the materials that we started with should be protected like in a museum.

Cover of the first Kurdish language textbook in Germany (Image credit: Martin Derince)

Mamoste Mesud’s lived experience of learning literary Kurdish in prison and eventually becoming one of the first Kurdish language teachers in Germany after he joined a self-organized language initiative and Mamoste Evdila’s using an old typewriter found in garbage to produce instructional materials might be striking because they defamiliarize the space of language learning. Yet, in no ways are they exceptional stories in the world of Kurdish language education. They are, in many ways, a defining one. They are a compact illustration of exactly how Resistance Habitus is manifested through historical consciousness, affective commitment, collective organization, strategic agency, transnational networks, and pedagogical innovation which I explained as six dimensions of Resistance Habitus in my research.

Resistance Habitus and Beyond

The KHLE experience in Germany does not ask us simply to admire what has been built against the odds. It asks us to take seriously what those odds reveal about whose languages are valued, whose communities are recognized, and whose educational needs are considered the responsibility of the state. These are not questions unique to the Kurdish case — but the Kurdish case makes them impossible to ignore. Language education is never neutral. Here, that truth is written into every lesson that exists because a group of people refused to accept that their language had no place in schools — and built that place themselves, against a policy landscape that had not foreseen them.

Yet recognizing this agency is not the same as celebrating it uncritically. The Kurdish case also shows what it costs when agency has to substitute for structure. When a single teacher produces their own materials, recruits students, negotiates with school administrators, and runs a classroom without professional support or formally recognized qualifications — that is agency, yes. It is also a burden that comparable programs do not place on individuals. Resistance Habitus names both the force of that agency and its price. Policy makers and educational administrators who take it seriously should be asking not only how to acknowledge what Kurdish actors have built, but how to dismantle the conditions that made such extraordinary effort necessary in the first place.