Kurdish identity across borders is sustained through particular people and institutions. A Swedish classroom account, Paris language teaching, international musical collaboration and a digitization project show practical work as well as limits, rather than a single guaranteed future.

Black-and-white portrait of Kamuran Bedir Khan with a moustache, jacket and patterned headwrap, bearing the Zheen Archive Center watermark
Kamuran Bedir Khan, who taught Kurdish in Paris. Portrait supplied by the Zheen Archive Center; the photographer and date are unidentified. This is not a photograph of the Gothenburg classroom discussed below. Zheen Archive Center · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.

A curriculum can support multilingual identity

Sweden’s national mother-tongue syllabus connects language learning with cultural identity and multilingualism. It includes reading literature, expressing opinions and comparing languages and cultural settings. [1] This educational approach offers a concrete alternative to assuming that a person must abandon one language to learn another. A syllabus establishes teaching aims, however; it does not measure every pupil’s experience or prove that all Kurdish families maintain the same practices. The particular language taught, classroom conditions and pupils’ own responses still matter.

Gothenburg: the work behind a Sorani classroom

In a municipal profile, Kurdish Sorani teacher Razaw Shah Mohammed describes teaching pupils of different ages and language levels within the same group. She began working for Gothenburg in 1996 and later joined its language centre. Most lessons take place after the ordinary school day. She reports sixty-minute sessions, travel between schools and a shortage of suitable materials, prompting her to create resources with colleagues. [2] Her account makes language maintenance tangible: planning, parental contact, coordination with class teachers and tired pupils all shape what can happen. It is one teacher’s professional account, not a survey of every Kurdish child in Sweden.

Paris and Brussels: teaching produced new resources

Joyce Blau’s recollection records enrolling in Kamuran Bedir Khan’s Kurdish classes in Paris in 1962. He encouraged her to work from Roger Lescot’s manuscript on a Kurdish–French vocabulary. Their weekly collaboration led to a Kurdish–French–English publication in Brussels in 1965. Blau also describes Natacha, Kamuran’s wife, typing and reproducing linguistic materials. [3] Cultural transmission here involved students, collaborators and practical production, not only a prominent public figure. The addition of French and English created further routes to readers while retaining Kurdish at the centre of the work.

Aynur: preserving songs while changing their setting

WOMEX’s 2021 Artist Award recognised Aynur’s preservation and renewal of Kurdish and Alevi musical culture. Its account describes a repertoire rooted in Kurdish folk songs and collaborations with musicians including Yo-Yo Ma and Kayhan Kalhor. [4] These are identifiable examples of musical exchange across audiences and traditions. They complicate a claim that heritage survives only when untouched by modern influences. The award is evidence of a particular body’s recognition and rationale, not a measurement of how every Kurdish listener understands the songs or a guarantee of wider political recognition.

Digital archives need more than a scanned page

Blnd Yaseen and Hossein Hassani’s 2024 research abstract describes work on recognizing text in Kurdish publications printed before 1950. Using material from the Zheen Center, they assembled 1,233 line images with transcriptions. Damage, unusual fonts and irregular spacing created difficulties for automatic recognition. [5] This offers a specific digital preservation problem beyond a general appeal to use social media. A page image, an accurately transcribed text and a searchable collection provide different forms of access. Digitization can widen possibilities, but it still depends on archives, careful checking and people able to read the material.

Sources and further reading

  1. Skolverket, Mother Tongue syllabus for compulsory school, excluding national minority languages; subject purpose, cultural identity and multilingualism.
  2. Lisa Stoopendal, Razaw hjälper eleverna hitta hem via språket, Gothenburg City Language Centre; teacher’s account of Sorani classes, planning and constraints, consulted 1 November 2026.
  3. Joyce Blau, Le gardien de la flamme, 1 March 2023; participant’s recollections of Paris classes, weekly collaboration and the Brussels vocabulary of 1965.
  4. WOMEX, 2021 Awards Recipients, Artist Award: Aynur; award rationale, repertoire and named collaborations.
  5. Blnd Yaseen and Hossein Hassani, Making Old Kurdish Publications Processable by Augmenting Available Optical Character Recognition Engines, submitted 9 April 2024, arXiv:2404.06101; published research abstract.
  6. Zheen Archive Center, Kamuran Bedir Khan portrait, photographer and date unidentified, supplied through Wikimedia cooperation, CC BY-SA 4.0.