On 29 May 2019, just one week after Zara’s arrest, Rezwan Hakimzadeh, the vice president of Iran’s Department of Education announced that the test of “sufficiency in Persian language” will be added across Iran in preschools. According to this discriminatory policy, if non-Persian children of Iran fail a Persian sufficiency test at the age of five, they will be treated as a person with biological defects and special needs, e.g. “low vision” and “low hearing,” “slow learner,” and “learning disabled.” Such systematic and governmental policies aimed at stigmatizing non-Persian children of Iran recall colonial states erasure of national identities of the countries, ethnic enclaves, and populations they colonized.
Under such discriminatory governmental policies, Kurdish language education relies on individual volunteer efforts such as Zara’s. Early this year, retired teacher Jamal Habibullah Faraj Bedar, in a matter of months translated the Qur’an to his mother tongue, Kurdish-Hawrami, in hopes of saving his dialect, which has been categorized by UNESCO as Definitely Endangered language. At present, Kurdish and other non-Persian languages of Iran have no official status, and have not benefited from any notable state promotion or support.
Scholars of Kurdish in Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan are aware of an increase in commitments to diversity at the rhetorical level, and decreasing commitments in terms of practical application, and even punitive reactions. Jim Cummins, one of the most prominent proponents of multilingual education, warns about such superficial progress: “The dominant group might provide some token support for teaching [minority] languages, knowing that just this token support would probably not be effective.”
As Cummins argues, if you put a frog in hot water, it will immediately jump out; however, if you put the frog in cold water and heat, it will tolerate the gradual increase and in its tolerance will die in the boiling water. That is to say, that “if the linguistic assimilation is slow then people will not realize that it’s happening”, and this policy has been adopted by the Iranian regime for many decades. Zara Mohammadi’s prison sentence is an unmistakable sign that the water is already boiling.
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Haidar Khezri | Radio Free (2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00) Iran: how to kill a language. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/06/iran-how-to-kill-a-language/
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