Before I understood language, I felt it in my body, in my senses. In the womb - even before I could form a word - I heard my mother’s voice. She would stroke her belly and release strange and sorrowful, yet tender sounds. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I felt that she was speaking to me.
Language didn’t make sense to me at first. It was a relationship, a melody that flowed through breath, blood, and my soul.
I believe a mother tongue begins when a human being first feels safe and realizes that he is not alone.
This continued after I was born. When I cried, she sang. When I couldn’t sleep, she rocked me with words that I still carry within me today. Sometimes when I close my eyes I hear them, as if they’re echoing from a distance or nearby. In moments of fear and shame - in those childhood years when I was mocked, beaten, or threatened - it was her hand and her voice in my mother tongue that kept me together.
A person can learn languages to function, to succeed, to move through the world. But just one language is rooted so early, in the depths of our being, that it feels like part of the nervous system. This language is not merely learned. It is embodied.
It is not romantic or an exaggeration to say that language is more than a tool; it is an anthropological truth. Every language is a unique way of organizing, interpreting, and remembering the world.
When a language disappears, it is not only vocabulary that is lost - a perspective vanishes. Within each language lies a treasury of stories, oral traditions, and collective experiences. Each time a language falls silent, a part of human memory fades with it.
Today about 7,000 languages are spoken in the world. Many will disappear in the next few decades. Not through explosions or headlines - but through silence.
I speak several languages. I author academic texts, novels, and research in languages that have opened doors for me. Every language is a universe, with its own logic and music. Yet my mother tongue remains something different, something deeper, because it is not merely a code. It is the first home of my inner world.
Language does not only reflect what we feel and think. It shapes it. It directs attention. It structures perception. It frames reality, opening possibilities or closing them. Perhaps we will never fully know how deeply language shapes our thinking. But one point is undeniable: It influences what we see, what we remember, and what we believe to be possible.
Words and emotions are more closely connected than we once assumed. When we translate pain or fear into words, more happens than communication. Something settles. Something calms. Language can transform anxiety into something that can be named. Human beings suffer and they speak. Perhaps they survive because they speak.
Yet language is ambivalent. By naming our experiences, we also fix them in place. Words can liberate and they can imprison. Whoever keeps saying, “I cannot do this,” builds an inner prison out of grammar. Whoever says, “I have not yet learned this,” opens a space for the future. Language is not magic. But it is a space of possibility.
In Kurdish poetry, this insight was never abstract.
In the 17th century, Ehmede Xani wrote in Mem u Zin that a people without their own language is like a body without a soul. For him, language was not decoration and not folklore. It was their existence. It was dignity. It was the vessel through which memory, love, and resistance were carried forward. When pain cannot be spoken, it is passed on in silence. When love has no language of its own, it loses its depth.
Seen this way, language is not merely an expression of inner states. It shapes them. It binds communities together because it allows suffering to be shared and hope to be spoken. It creates a world in which we do not merely function. We understand one another.
That is why it cuts so deeply when a language is devalued politically. In Turkey, the Kurdish language was banned, sanctioned, and delegitimized for decades. This was not simply an intervention in a communication system. It was an intervention in biographies, in self images, in generations. The dominant language became the language of recognition, of career, of security - through which one is taken seriously, is left in peace.
Assimilation rarely begins with violence. It begins with advantages.
Today Kurdish is sometimes tolerated. Yet within that tolerance lies a new and perhaps even greater danger. Paradoxically, the Kurdish language is more endangered than ever, particularly in Turkey. Not primarily through open prohibition, but through symbolic containment and structural marginalization.
Kurdish is gradually being transformed from a language of resistance into a folkloric language, into an exhibit. Like an object in a museum: visible, yet emptied of substance. Recognized as cultural heritage, yet deprived of real usage in daily life, in institutions, in structures of power. One may sing in Kurdish. One may dance to it. But one should not govern with it, judge with it, or build a career through it.
Turkish remains the language of power, administration, academic recognition, and social mobility. It is the language of those who succeed, of those who belong. Through it, one rises. Through it, one is protected.
Kurdish, by contrast, is tolerated but not respected. It is not attacked openly. It is displaced subtly. Not only through loud repression, but through structural irrelevance. Through the absence of institutional anchoring. Through the implicit message: you may speak, but it will not get you anywhere.
In this way, a language slowly loses its place in society.
And when a language has no place, it loses its future.
Assimilation does not always happen loudly. It can be quiet. Administrative. Bureaucratic. Economically rational. It operates through educational systems, labor markets, and prestige. It creates a hierarchy of languages, one representing capital and the other, sentimentality.
Repression can provoke resistance. Eliminating structures makes one forget. And forgetting outlasts any prohibition.
As long as Kurdish is not spoken freely in the streets - as long as people do not bargain and trade in Kurdish in markets, as long as children are not educated in their mother tongue - it will fade from everyday life. This danger does not exist in Turkey alone - institutional weakness and political control gradually marginalize Kurdish in Iran and Syria as well.
Indifference destroys quietly.
For a people divided across four states and scattered throughout a vast diaspora, language is more than an identity marker. It is the thread that makes a “we” even imaginable. When that thread weakens, the shared sense of self begins to fracture. Without a living language, belonging becomes a formality.
And yet our survival was never just political - it was cultural. Poems, songs, stories, and novels were our archives. No tanks carried our souls. Voices did. Melodies in a language that one does not merely speak, but feels.
There are words one can truly weep only in one’s own language.
And words of forgiveness that exist only there.
If we do not have our own state, then all the more responsibility falls upon us to protect what does not depend on borders: our language. Not through dogma. Not through coercion. But through daily life.
A language lives in conversation with parents, with friends.
In love.
In arguments.
In laughter.
In whispers.
In classrooms.
In poetry.
It lives wherever people truly meet within it.
Without a language that we do not merely use but inhabit, we become machines. Functional. Adapted. Efficient. Yet inwardly hollow. A machine speaks in order to function. A human being speaks in order to live.
In my mother tongue lies exactly that.
It is the language of my first sense of safety.
The language of my wounds.
The language of my resistance.
The language of my soul.
And therefore it must not merely survive.
It must breathe.
Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.