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Kurdish Students Prefer English to Out-dated Arabic
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Only 359 of the university students study in Arabic compared to 999 in English and 555 in Kurdish.
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ARBIL,
May 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Most Kurdish
students are shunning Arabic, Iraq's official language, which they see
as outdated, in favor of English as their second language.
"Arabic
became a third language for us," Hany Kader Khoder, Arbil high
school director, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Friday, May 27.
"Our
1,442 students study in their own language and don't know Arabic these
days," he added.
High
school teachers now hold lessons for four or five hours per week in
Kurdish and Arabic, one hour less in English, Khoder said.
He
argued that the pupils "prefer English, because, to them, Arabic
is the language of oppression and the atrocities of the former
regime."
The
Kurds have enjoyed 13 years of increasing autonomy and prosperity in a
protected security zone in Iraq since the first Gulf War.
Intermediaries
Ali
Mahmoud Jukil, a senior faculty member in languages at Salaheddin
University, said students favor English because it is "the
universal language of modernity".
Of
the students enrolled at Salaheddin, only 359 study in Arabic compared to 999 in English and 555 in
Kurdish.
"Those
who study in Arabic do so because they did not have good enough grades
in the baccalaureate to study in English, or for religious
reasons," said Taher Mustafa, one of only four Arabic language
lecturers at the university.
"They
might want to understand the Qur'an, or to work as intermediaries
between Kurdish northern Iraq and the rest of the country."
The
Kurdish people in northern Iraq speak four dialects, none of them
readily inter-comprehensible.
The
differences between the two most widely spoken -- Kurmanji and Sorani
-- lie at the root of the continuing division between the two main
Iraqi Kurdish factions, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Rewriting
History
Following
the 1991 Gulf war when the western intervention established a
self-rule Kurdish area in northern Iraq, many schools and universities
in the area switched their teaching from Arabic into Kurdish.
The
switch to Kurdish as a teaching medium has gone hand in hand with a
radical rewriting of history and geography books from Saddam's time,
said Sabah Aram, an education official in the Kurdish regional
administration.
"Before,
the books did not mention Kurdistan. Students knew the history and the
geography of all other Arab countries but not their own," he
said.
"From
now on, students first study their native area, then Iraq, and
finally, the rest of the world."
Jalal
Talabani, the PUK leader, was elected president by the transitional
parliament on April 6, becoming the first Kurdish president in the
country's history.
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