Syrian Minister of Education Mohammad Abdulrahman Turko issued an official decision allowing Kurdish to be taught as a “national language,” though not an official one, in public and private schools. The decision will take effect with the start of the 2026–2027 academic year, in implementation of Legislative Decree No. 13 of 2026, issued by the Syrian presidency. Under the decision, Kurdish will be offered as an optional subject in areas with a Kurdish population, for three classes per week, with students’ grades counting toward their final overall scores.

But the question remains: Have the Kurds achieved the status they seek for their language? And does this decision truly recognize their rights and put an end to decades of attempts to suppress their identity?

There was one moment in Syria’s modern history when Kurdish was formally embedded in the country’s institutional landscape, at a time when nationalist centralism in Damascus was neither able nor powerful enough to prevent it. This was in the Jarabulus district in the 1920s, when Kurdish was recognized as an official language there alone. It became an official language of education, and the ability to speak it, alongside Arabic, was a requirement for certain public positions.

Both before and after that recognition, representatives of Kurdish political structures, from the earliest days of Syria’s formation as a modern state, demanded that Kurdish be made an official language in Syrian Kurdistan. It was a Kurdish objective that was never abandoned. Nor was the demand ever simply about learning the language or understanding its grammar. It was a demand for Kurdish to be a language of education and of the state: a constitutionally recognized official language representing part of this land and its people.

In the political memory of Syria’s Kurds, the Kurdish language came to represent the crown jewel of their cause. Over time, language became the foundation upon which Kurdish demands for political, geographical, cultural and national distinctiveness were built, and the core of their political discourse.

It is therefore unsurprising that language occupied such a central place within Kurdish society and families, as well as in Kurdish political and cultural activities. Kurdish remained the language through which Kurds conducted their lives, interacted within their communities, and carried out their daily activities. Arabic, by contrast, was largely the language through which they encountered state institutions and education, the principal means through which the state intervened in the character and identity of their surroundings, and the primary expression of the state’s presence.

As long as Kurdish remained unofficial, both in schools and within state institutions, the state itself remained alien to them: an entity that neither represented nor expressed them, one they perceived as external to their community and as an adversary.

The first problem with this discourse, which sets the limits of linguistic rights within the Syrian state, became apparent the moment it emerged. The exceptional measures, transitional and temporary by their very nature, aimed at repositioning the Kurds within Syria are instead being used to redefine their very existence in the country and impose a form of political dhimmitude upon them under the banner of “citizenship.”

It is the same notion of citizenship that regarded Kurds as Syrian Arab citizens when restoring the nationality that had been forcibly stripped from them, presenting its restoration as something being “granted” to them. And it is the same logic that diminishes the place of language in Kurdish political memory as the vessel of their political project, framing it, at best, as a cultural offshoot within a broader identity that is fundamentally Arab.

The Kurdish language recognized by Damascus is thus the language of a community excluded from shaping public affairs, from defining Syria’s identity and from determining what Syria itself is. That identity, in this conception, can consist of only one identity and one language, while everything else is reduced to a derivative or subordinate branch. It resembles the familiar rhetoric of “one army, one country, one flag.” But as for who actually owns this unity, it is not the Kurds, at the very least, nor others like them.

This is precisely what it means to inherit the decaying legacy of a bygone regime, redefine it and reproduce it in different forms while preserving both its essence and its ultimate objective: how to achieve a Syria in which all Syrians are Arab and their language is Arabic.

There is no significant difference between what the “new Syria” has “achieved” about the Kurdish language and what was already in place toward the end of the former Baathist regime. Once the regime realized that its attempts to deny the very existence of the Kurdish language had reached a dead end, and that it had no choice but to acknowledge its existence, it devised an imagined form of recognition that aligned with its own conception of Kurdish existence and offered it a way out of this impasse. 

At the time, the regime sought to create a “cultural space” in which Kurdish could circulate, treating it as a foreign language: language courses at specialized institutes, books translated into Kurdish and Arabic under the category of “international translations,” as well as Kurdish music, theater, and voices. At the same time, the opposition also took advantage of this approach, adopting similar practices. 

But when Kurdish was understood as an expression of Kurdish political identity, the response followed the same course pursued for decades: prohibition, repression and authoritarianism. The language remained subject to the oppression of successive regimes, accompanied by silencing and arrests. All of this served a single objective: to keep Kurdish a foreign language in its own country. 

What the Syrian Ministry of Education has introduced is little more than another step toward that same objective, despite attempts to present it in a more favorable light. Kurdish remains, in effect, a language treated as foreign to Syria: a language deemed suitable to be learned, but not to serve as a language of instruction. It is a language that Arabic can absorb into its own alphabet, while Arabic remains the sole language representing the population’s identity and collective memory and defining them constitutionally.

Arabic has thus remained the Kurds’ official language and their designated mother tongue in the eyes of the state and in their dealings with its institutions, as well as the language through which their political, social and national identity is defined. Kurdish, meanwhile, has remained a foreign-language class granted to citizens only recently incorporated into this Syrian entity, fulfilling an objective pursued since the country’s inception: to keep Kurdish foreign to Syria.

Some leaders in the new Syria treat language as a tool for subordinating the Kurds to an Arab identity and redefining them as a cultural and linguistic minority within a single people. For the Kurds, this approach is nothing new. There is a living, century-old example: Turkey, a state that openly defines Kurds as Turkish citizens. Syria, it seems, seeks to follow the Turkish model in its treatment of them. 

And this is not limited to language alone. The concept of the Turkish nation itself is built on the erasure of others and their heritage, absorbing both into this “nation.” The process follows a clear pattern: attempted extermination, Turkification or Arabization, attempts at assimilation, recognition of Kurds as a component belonging to a broader national identity, and the acceptance of certain cultural characteristics that the state deems compatible with its national security. A solution is thus manufactured, and that solution is the “Syrian nation”: a nation that once claimed the Kurds were Arabs and produced theories to support that claim, only to discover that they are indeed Arabs, just different kinds of Arabs.

Needless to say, Arabic remained a language Kurds learned through coercion rather than choice. It was a language they encountered at school, where they were punished for failing to master it and beaten for struggling to understand it. They spoke it only with the sword hanging over them, and faced imprisonment if they acknowledged any other language as their own within the state. It became a language that united them through experiences of beatings, torture and humiliation.

Those who did not speak Arabic and never had the opportunity to attend school remained complete foreigners. At best, Syria turned them into objects of ridicule when they attempted to speak a language whose alternative, for them, was death.

Kurds learned their language from their mothers, in their homes and on the streets where it was spoken. They resisted every regime that sought to eradicate the language and, by extension, their very existence, and all such attempts failed.

Kurds know their language well. They speak it and are fluent in it. They were never seeking merely to learn Kurdish; what they wanted was for it to be the language of their cities’ institutions and schools, just as it is the language of their land and their homeland.

Ultimately, Kurdish language classes in schools cannot resolve the question of a people whose claim to the land is Kurdistan.