Language and Nation-Building in Kurdistan-Iraq Jaffer Sheyholislami, PhD School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University, Canada Paper presented at the Middle Eastern Studies Association 43th Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, USA, November 21-24, 2009. Please do not quote without permission Introduction Language has frequently been considered an integral part of nation building. If nation-building has often meant nation destroying, 1 it has also meant imposing one language while suppressing others. 2 Since the birth of the French Republic, most language policies have been informed by the nation-state ideology (henceforth NSI), which is used here to refer to the view that a nation must be congruent politically, culturally and linguistically. Pursuing this policy under the pretext of preventing political disintegration, states have carried out acts of linguicide 3 against non- state/minority languages. Kurdish has been a victim of this policy even though we have noticed some significant changes in the status of Kurdish in recent years. In Iraq Kurdish is now an official language. 4 In the Kurdish region, since 1992, Kurdish (the Sorani variety in particular) has been the working language of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), schools and the media. In addition, languages other than Kurdish have been taught in schools and used in the media. A recent study comparing Kurdish in Iraq and Turkey 5 view this promoting of minority languages such as Turkmani and Syriac in Kurdistan, as 1 Connor (1994). 2 Billig (1995); Bourdieu (1991). 3 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000, p. 312): “Another way of reducing the number of possible nations (and thereby nation-states) is to commit linguistic genocide. This represents (actively) killing a language without killing the speakers (as in physical genocide) or (through passivity) letting a language die … Unsupported coexistence mostly also leads to minority languages dying.” 4 See the Iraqi constitution (in English), article 4: http://www.uniraq.org/documents/iraqi_constitution.pdf (Retrieved August 15, 2009) 5 Skutnabb-Kangas & Fernandes (2008).