Standard Language

For years, we have repeatedly encountered the slogans of a ‘unified language’ and a ‘unified orthography’, of standard language and the standardization process. The justification offered is that a unified orthography can bring us together: a unified orthography will do this and that. These resemble all the glittering slogans and propaganda of rulers and occupiers shaped by Nazi and chauvinist thought, who proclaimed ‘themselves and their language’ the holiest, highest, and genetically superior. From the perspective of linguistic ecology and language policy, this policy ties the Kurdish language exclusively to a single geopolitical linguistic region. Most decisions about ‘standard language’ have emerged, and continue to emerge, from people in that linguistic environment, where political personalities have appeared far more often than linguists or specialists in the science of language.

We see that the method and intellectual paradigm of the ‘nation-state’ deploys the dangerous slogans of a unified language, unified dress, a unified anthem, and unified territory, carrying the banner of this outlook. With the rise of the fascistic politics of nationalist nation-state fascism, we also see the movement and emergence of Kurdish nationalism and ‘standard language’ in precisely one geopolitical region, Sulaymaniyah and Mukriyan, employing the same nation-state method and thinking in a region that has produced many political figures. Linguistic imperialism consequently appears among Kurds through the same nation-state method and paradigm. Other languages within the Kurdish language tree are subjected to a dominant and powerful system of linguistic assimilation, and even cultural assimilation, under attack from a supposedly sacred and superior ‘ethnicity, language, and culture’ identified with Sulaymaniyah and Mukriyan. The alphabet and words selected by the mechanism of language standardization are then imposed, and speakers must abandon thought and neural or mental encoding in their own mother and environmental languages. They are made to think through an alien system and set of rules. Here we confront the extinction of thought and the death of philosophy, because anyone entering the domain of ‘standard language’ must submit to directives determined by the dominant system and cannot think according to the data structures of their own primary, environmental language.

Jamal Nabaz was evidently one of the principal figures in the rise and promotion of the slogan of ‘standard language’. Others later discussed the subject, and some amplified it by attaching labels such as ‘great’, ‘peerless’, or ‘eminent linguist’. But who are these great and eminent figures? They are the same supposedly superior and sacred stock. It has been rare for a knowledgeable specialist linguist to write or speak about ‘standard language’ from the same unscientific and illogical outlook, or for such an argument to come from a region distant from that geopolitical area. Sensitivity to and discussion of the subject has largely come from poets, singers, and artists. Few linguists have entered this field, because linguists know that nothing should be asserted about language, the most important domain of scientific and sensory philosophy, without scientific and logical grounds. Here, however, the foundation is an unscientific and non-linguistic system systematically engaged in dissolving thought and constraining imagination and reason.

This establishes the foundations of a system of obscurantism that does not want a people to become knowledgeable or learned. Language is an unbroken current linking the brain and phenomena: human beings think, form words, produce and externalize things, and then read them. Throughout the eras of dictatorial rule, peoples have been enslaved and kept illiterate, prevented from knowing. If a people and a language think and express themselves through the structures of their own brain and environmental language, they confront the system that colonizes enslaved minds. That system therefore prevents them from thinking and writing by imposing predetermined linguistic commands and laws. As a wholly natural phenomenon, language, within the sensory and ontological sphere, is interwoven with the brain’s capacity to create, compose, and generate thought. When this mechanism is mixed with imposed ‘law’ and ‘rules’, it departs from its natural and ontological basis, becomes bound, and is immobilized. A person can no longer think or speak. If language is made subject to law, it dies. History presents many languages that disappeared and died after their natural capacity for thought was taken from them through imposed laws and rules. Kurdish has remained resilient and continuous precisely because it lacked such linguistic law and regulation. What standard language does is bring about the death of semantics, pragmatics, lexemes, syntax, and segments, because its laws and rules attack the creators and producers of linguistic mental data in Kalhori, Laki, Hawrami, and Kurmanji, in the northern and southern spheres generally, and in many parts of the central sphere, together with their environmental languages. When the words of these languages are neither written nor preserved, the languages gradually die and disappear. One function of orthography is to preserve written languages for the future and for future research; writing carries the hidden record of the present into tomorrow, just as records from the past serve us today. From the perspectives of psycholinguistics, linguistic psychopathology, and sociolinguistics, ‘standard orthography’ poses the same danger of loss and linguistic extinction to environmental languages. Speakers within this language tree are compelled to obey the decisions of a superior, ruling, and dominant language and are denied the right to write and express opinions according to their own mental and linguistic structures.

Nevertheless, like many linguists and advocates of Kurdish, I recognize the importance of a standard language, within educational, administrative, and literary domains, as part of language standardization. Such a body of abstract rules corresponds to a greater or lesser extent with the actual pragmatic and field use of language in its environment and serves a simple educational system and a simple orthography. Both orthography and education are founded on simplification, and standard language performs that function. For a multilingual complex such as Kurdish, this work must of course be undertaken through ecolinguistics, geolinguistics, field linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistics, and, most importantly, phonology. Within sociolinguistics and language planning, the scientific domains relevant to the subject include:

• National language (Standard language)
• Official language (National language)
• Mother language (official language)
• Intermediary language (Lingua franca)
• Dead language

All languages in the Kurdish language tree, in their multilingual sphere, must enter the process of language standardization for the following purposes:

1. To organize and establish the language in terms of orthography and alphabet.
2. To simplify and facilitate writing and practice according to the science of language.
3. To use the phonological and phonetic systems of the environmental languages within the standardized language.
4. To collect and establish a refined, unified lexicon from all the languages, selecting one or two words for each meaning in the standardized language tree.
5. To create and construct new words and terms by drawing on the morphology of the environmental languages within the standardized language tree.
6. To develop and disseminate the language beyond its general environment and to compare it linguistically with the world’s scholarly and living languages.
7. To employ technology, integrate the language into global technology, and develop it on the internet.
8. To remove and prevent prejudice, and to keep the language away from arbitrary purism.
9. To establish neutral, scholarly printing and publishing institutions.
10. To publish journals and books according to the principles of standardization.

Sabir Zhakaw