One Minority, One Language? Evaluating Linguistic Justice for the Kurdish Minority in Iran and Iraq

The case of the Kurdish minority in Iran and Iraq highlights the importance of monitoring linguistic justice to assess a country's inclusiveness and political stability. The Kurdish language is significant for the Kurdish people in the Middle East as it represents their identity. However, it is not a uniform language and has different dialects or varieties, which are spoken in different regions of Kurdistan. The main dialects are Kurmanji and Sorani, with Kurmanji being spoken in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and Sorani being spoken mainly in Iraq and Iran, where it is also the language of education in the Kurdistan region. This paper compares the strategies of language policy and planning in Iraq and in Iran to evaluate which one grants the higher level of linguistic justice to the Kurdish minority. While Iraq's federal approach has provided some linguistic rights based on a territoriality principle, it does not expand to all Kurdish varieties spoken in the region. In contrast, Iran's liberal laissez-faire diglossia policy appears more inclusive on paper, but it results in a much lower level of linguistic justice in practice. Policymakers need effective tools to address multilingualism and evaluate the effectiveness of language policies, which can create disadvantages for different linguistic groups and lead to social unease and discrimination. Linguistic justice is an important variable in language policy and planning, and its evaluation provides useful measures of a country's level of political stability and inclusion of minorities. Monitoring the degree of linguistic justice in a society can help policymakers reduce tensions inherent to multicultural states and promote policies that reduce discriminatory situations between different ethnolinguistic groups.

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https://works.eurac.edu/Digop-01-2023-cecilia-gialdini-one-minority-one-language.pdf