‘They silenced our voices’; a genealogy of the linguistic othering of the Kurds in Iran

Abstract

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Kurds in Iran have faced various forms of linguistic exclusion. As part of a genealogical project, this article aims to track the lineages of this exclusion. The linguistic exclusions are inscribed in a field of discursivity, which, tracking one of its lineages, turns our attention to the orientalist interventions. The article discusses two complementary projects: the authentication of the Persian language and the othering of the Kurdish language. These projects were made possible by the hegemony of territorial and linguistic discourses over orientalist studies in Iran. Orientalists proposed a periodization of Iranian languages, dividing them into old, middle, and modern eras, with Persian represented as the sole language that has ever existed throughout history, based on their decoding of ancient manuscripts. Meanwhile, the Kurdish language was completely marginalized, and Persian was represented as the essence of all Iranian languages and, consequently, as the language of all Iranians. As a result, an ontological and epistemic horizon emerged, on which all subsequent instances of othering of the Kurds became possible. Finally, the article also examines the ways in which the Kurds have resisted the linguistic exclusions.