TURKEY tr-national
Turkey's Zaza gearing up efforts for recognition of rights
ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News | 5/23/2011 12:00:00 AM | VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU
Representatives of Turkey’s Zaza community are planning to meet with officials in Ankara to voice their demands for greater cultural recognition and linguistic rights.
Representatives of Turkey’s Zaza community are planning to meet with officials in Ankara in the coming weeks to voice their demands for greater cultural recognition and broader linguistic rights.
“The [state-run] TRT broadcasts [in Zazaki] for only a few minutes, and this is not enough. The duration of these broadcasts need to be lengthened and their content needs to be diversified,” Mehmet Tüzün, the chairman of Zaza Language and Culture Association, or Zaza-Der, recently told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
Zaza-Der opened its first office in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district at the end of April to help serve the country Zaza community, which is estimated to total 4 million people in Turkey.
“The teaching of our language at an academic level also represents a second step [in gaining our] linguistic rights. State institutions are dominated by the ‘one nation, one language’ mindset. Our people have not passed on their language even to their children to avoid running into problems,” said Tüzün.
Zaza-Der will be lobbying for broadcasting and education rights in their native language during their trip to Ankara and plans to request assistance from the Education Ministry to have textbooks published in Zazaki, Tüzün said.
“A significant portion of the Zaza thought it was sufficient to [solely] learn Kurdish because it was [mistakenly] believed that the Zaza tounge was an offshoot of Kurdish. This turned out to be a big mistake, however,” said Tüzün, explaining the reason why many Zaza failed to hold protect their mother tongue.
“Zazaki comes from the northwestern branch of the Iranian language group, while Kurdish originates from its southwestern branch,” said Tüzün, noting that Zazaki had entered UNESCO’s list of endangered languages.
Some Zaza people cannot write in their native tongue, although they can speak it, while others know no Zaza at all, said Tüzün. “We will initiate a special program to overcome such problems.”
Some believe that the Zaza constitute a distinct ethnic group, while others argue that they represent a subdivision of the general Kurdish population. The Zaza tongue is an Indo-European language like Kurdish and Persian.
[HH] Looking to expand association
“We managed to found our association at last. Now is the time to get to work under the association with [our] 12 founding members. We aim to bring more native Zazaki speakers under this umbrella,” said Tüzün, adding that they had been holding regular meetings for three years to establish and begin operating the association.
Any and all books written about the Zaza are needed by the association, which is planning to open up a library, said Tüzün.
It is impossible to maintain a language without education, and a person who does not know his mother tongue starts off life with serious handicaps, said Tüzün.
Many Zaza, whose home regions include the eastern provinces of Tunceli, Bingöl and others, have now migrated, either to Istanbul or abroad to countries to such as Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, Tüzün said.
