Mother Tongue, the First Home

Before we learn to read, we learn to listen. The first words fall on our ears like early-spring rain and, without our knowing, take root inside us. Later those words become the names of things: bread, water, mother, home. The world is heard before it is seen.

Language as a place

A mother tongue is not merely a tool of communication; it is a place. A house whose walls are built of sound and whose windows are made of memory. When we speak our mother tongue, we are really returning to the room where we were first given a name.

Every language is a map of the world; the mother tongue is the map we held before all the others.

Linguists tell us that a baby recognizes its mother's voice even before birth¹. We have listened, in other words, before we have ever opened our eyes. That is why a mother tongue is never just "information" — it is feeling, scent, warmth.

Between two languages

Anyone who lives in two or more languages knows that each carries its own climate. A word is warm in one language and the same word is cold in another. For us as Kurds, this raises deeper questions:

• How do we protect a language that, throughout history, was so often given no room in schools and offices?
• How do we write in a language that, for many of us, has been the language of home rather than the language of books?
• And how do we make it a language of thought, not only a language of feeling?

This journal is an attempt to answer those questions — not with slogans, but with writing. Essay by essay, word by word.

Writing as return

Every line written in Kurdish is a return home. To write in one's mother tongue is to insist that this language deserves to carry thought, research and beauty, like any other language in the world. We are here to light that house up, room by room.

Footnotes

1. See, for example, the well-known studies of fetal hearing in the final months of pregnancy, which show that newborns distinguish the sound and melody of their mother's language from unfamiliar ones. ↩