Criminal complaint against IYI Party's Türkeş over 'Kurdish' definition: Inciting hatred and hostility
A criminal complaint has been filed against IYI Party MP Ayyüce Türkeş for 'inciting the public to hatred and hostility' following her remarks that 'the language spoken separately by our people we call Kurds consists of 8,200 words from three languages.'
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In a speech at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM), IYI Party MP Ayyüce Türkeş stated that Ottoman Turkish was composed of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, and made a similar assessment regarding the Kurdish language.
Türkeş had used the following expressions: "According to research conducted by linguists, the language that our people, our brothers and sisters whom we call Kurds, speak separately from us in the eastern and southeastern parts of our country today is a dialect determined to consist of 8,200 words from these three languages."
"A CONDESCENDING PERSPECTIVE"
Following these statements, lawyer Bişar Abdi Alinak filed a criminal complaint against Türkeş.
In the petition submitted by Alinak, it was emphasized that Kurdish is a language belonging to the Indo-European language family, possesses a vocabulary of 918 thousand 123 words, and ranks eighth in the world.
In the petition reached by Sibel Yükler from T24, it was stated that Türkeş's expressions reflect a condescending perspective that ignores the language and existence of a nation, and it was noted: "These bigoted and narrow-minded thoughts have gone down as a black mark in the history of our geography and have caused terrible massacres unprecedented in history."
In the criminal complaint filed against Türkeş for "inciting the public to hatred and hostility or insulting," it was stated: "Claiming that the vocabulary capacity of this language, which is used for daily communication and professional life by nearly 55-60 million Kurds today, consists of only 8,200 words is to not recognize and to ignore a language and a race."