Turkish officials have been saying that the Kurdish language will not be an official language for education. When Bulent Arinc, deputy prime minister, met with Osman Baydemir, the head of the Diyarbakir municipality, he told him, “We will not adopt studying in the Kurdish language, but Kurdish can be an optional subject in schools.”

Artists who represent Turkey in the annual Eurovision song contest are free to compose their works in languages other than Turkish, İbrahim Şahin, director of the country’s state-owned broadcasting station TRT, said yesterday in a written statement.

The International Turkish Language Olympiads attracted great interest in their eighth edition on Monday in Moscow, where 215 students competed to win prizes in various categories, including song and poetry, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press attaché was awarded for his contributions to Turkish-Russian relations.

There are positive and negative sides to having Kurdish as an elective course. First of all, Kurds are not a homogenous group of people. There are different groups of Kurdish children in Turkey. When we look at this heterogeneity in terms of language, we see that some of them know little Turkish or no Turkish at all when they start school. There are also those children whose Kurdish and Turkish are at almost the same level.

In Hopa, they only speak Homshetsma. No one understands their Russian. Their dialect and the one spoken in Hopa have remained basically the same, just some vocabulary is different. “Just a few words here and there are completely different. For example, they say mashina for a car and we say tilezhka. We say makina for a sewing machine but here it’s used to describe a laundry machine,” Nargiza explains.

The Faculty of Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in the Basque capital city of Vitoria-Gasteiz was the location chosen for the presentation of the only Turkish-Spanish/Spanish-Turkish dictionary to date that brings together the phonetic transcription of entries, as well as having ample introductions on both Spanish and Turkish grammar.

Kemal, a teacher for over 15 years, says that the school lacks space, educational materials, and another teacher. But the main problem, he thinks, is the language: "By law, we teachers are forced to speak Turkish [in class], but some children don't understand. You put pressure on them; you basically treat them as if they were slow-witted, but the children in front of you simply do not understand because they do not speak Turkish."

In the weeks and months after 9/11, the talk in the United States was about the need to be better prepared to understand the culture and languages of the Middle East. There was a surge of college students enrolling in Arabic and Persian. More than a decade later, that initial surge is showing signs of slowing down even while the world focuses on the Arab world again as homegrown pro-democracy movements shake up governments in the region.

...Enter the “Language Transfer” project: an innovative scheme that is underway in Cyprus offering free downloadable Greek lessons for English speakers, and English for Spanish speakers. Turkish, Greek Cypriot dialect and Turkish Cypriot dialect lessons are also in the pipeline.

Turkish can be accepted as a common language for the whole Turkic world, Nizami Jafarov, Chairman of the Azerbaijani Parliament's Culture Committee, reported at conference entitled "Cultural Integration of Turkic World: Common Turkic Alphabet and Language" on Thursday.

In a southern Italian high school, many students have deemed the introduction of Turkish classes as an effort in vain because of the language's supposed difficulty due to what they mistakenly thought was caused by the use of the Arabic alphabet.

The president of the Religious Affairs Directorate on Tuesday expressed strong criticism of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party’s (BDP) decision to have the call to prayer (adhan) recited in Kurdish, saying reciting the adhan in any language other than its original Arabic is unacceptable.

Twitter this week added support for Russian and Turkish, meaning you can now tweet in nine different languages. At the beginning of this year, Twitter added Korean to its list of languages, and it announced the new addition of Russian and Turkish in a Tuesday blog post.