Proceedings of 2 nd Patras International Conference of Graduate Students in Linguistics, 107-119. Patras: Publications of University of Patras. 1 Sociopolitical factors influencing the situation of Kurdish in Turkey Ergin Opengin, Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, LACITO, Paris ergin.opengin@boun.edu.tr This paper aims at providing a detailed description of sociopolitical aspects of Kurdish in Turkey. The typology of Edwards (1992) was used for the analysis of sociopolitical factors. He proposes eleven categories such as demographic, sociologic, linguistic etc. Each category is analyzed according to the “speaker”, “language” and “setting”; thus, the model proposes a total of thirty three variables for a thorough analysis. The analysis carried out against the background of the extant literature, first-hand sociological reports, journal and blog articles, showed that several sociopolitical dimensions were apt to reinforce the ethnolinguistic vitality of the speech community, such as the geographical position of Kurdish minority, the works on the corpus planning of Kurdish, etc. While, on the other hand, principally oral status of Kurdish, the strict measures against its public usage, etc. are the factors that have led/lead to the relegation of the language vis- à-vis the dominant language and to the restriction of its usage to only several domains. Key-words: Kurdish, language shift, diglossia, language situations, social domains, ethnolinguistic vitality, identity 1. Introduction Kurdish language in Turkey, in spite of its large number of speakers, (estimations revolve around 13 to 20 millions), and its historical contact with many of the languages of the Middle East, has rarely been the object of a sociolinguistic description. It is interesting to note that N°165 of the International Journal of Sociology of Language (2004), devoted to the sociolinguistic description of the languages in Turkey, included no studies on the situation of Kurdish, although it has the second largest speech community after Turkish. Yagmur (2001) is an account on the situation of languages in Turkey; however, Kurdish receives only marginal treatment in the paper. He is especially reductionist in his generalizations and comparisons. For instance, comparing the linguistic unitarism followed in Turkey and France without mentioning highly different dimensions in these two contexts creates an impression as if the situation in Turkey is naturally analogous to some other contexts in any western country. Hassanpour (1992), on the other hand, illustrates the relationship between the language and nationalism in Kurdistan, thus many other aspects of a language situation are not treated in his accounts. Hence, in this paper, I