Documentary as Dictionary, Documentary as Classroom: Preserving Kurdish Languages and Reclaiming Kurdish Worlds through Film

Abstract

This article examines how documentary film preserves, and reclaims Kurdish languages in Turkey within a sociopolitical context defined by linguistic suppression and subtractive educational practices. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s (1976) insight that language constitutes a world, the paper frames the repression of Kurdish as an attempt to regulate and fragment lived Kurdish worlds, exploring how documentary cinema exposes and intervenes in this process. Through a close analysis of Veli Kahraman’s Where Is My Mother Tongue? (2012) and classroom-centred documentaries like Orhan Eskiköy and Özgür Doğan’s On the Way to School (2008) and Emine Emel Balcı’s Ich Liebe Dich (2012), the article develops two interconnected frameworks: documentary as dictionary and documentary as classroom. In the former, film operates as an audiovisual lexicon that reattaches Zazaki words to lived experience, “bringing the world to the dictionary” and reinstating a suppressed linguistic presence within the public sphere. In the latter, documentary renders visible the long-term effects of linguistic deterritorialization and subtractive education, tracing what Coşkun, Derince, and Uçarlar (2012) describe as the “scar of tongue.” Engaging with Walter Mignolo’s (2009) concept of epistemic disobedience, the article argues that Kurdish documentary practices in question enact a decolonial epistemic reconstitution. By reinserting marginalized linguistic worlds into audiovisual forms, these documentaries confront hegemonic invisibilisation and affirm Kurdish languages as dynamic sites of struggle, of love, and active world-making.