The Kurdistan Region’s Language Ecology: The shift from Kurdish to English

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ludwig Paul
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528506225

Iraq, including the autonomous region of Kurdistan (Northern Iraq), has been largely neglected by World Englishes research. Although English gained a foothold in Iraq during the British Mandate period (1920-32) and until the end of the Kingdom of Iraq (1958), it played a much smaller role there after 1958 than in many other regions of the world that had previously been British colonies. However, the particular political constellation of the Kurdistan Region and other specific factors have led to the rapid and effective spread of English in the Kurdistan Region over the last 20 years or so. The project aims to investigate the multiple historical, linguistic, cultural, social and political factors that determine the linguistic situation of the Kurdistan Region today and that are responsible for the recent rise of English. This will be done on the basis of 180 online interviews, 60 of which will also be conducted as qualitative interviews. The special features of Kurdish lie in the linguistic-cultural and to some extent also political emancipation that is possible for a Kurdish community within the Kurdistan Region for the first time in modern history, and in the tension between self-determination, complex political reality and economic-social constraints. Linguistic questions and problems such as the relationship between the two main Kurdish varieties (Badinani and Sorani) and the relationship between Kurdish and Arabic and English are embedded in these contexts. English, as a promise of modernity and prosperity, may become a greater threat to Kurdish cultural independence and identity in the near future than the attempts at Arabisation by the Iraqi state, which Kurds have bravely fended off time and again for decades. The discourse on this topic within Kurdish society is also taken into account and lends the project additional topicality and social relevance.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5728: Convergence on Dominant Language Constellations: World Englishes in their local multilingual ecologies (CODILAC)
• International Connection: Iraq
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Zana Ibrahim