The Recent Works and Planing of The Kurdish Institute of Istanbul

Dear Readers,
In this article, we want to inform those interested in Kurdish language, literature and history about what we have been doing and are planning to do at the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul currently. As it’s been published before, the 4th Ordinary Congress of the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul was held on 29th December and new members were elected for the board of management. We have adopted the co-chairmanship system for the board of management which is applied for the first time at a civil institution of Kurds. Samî Tan and Gulseren Yilmaz were elected as co-chairmans of the Institute and Haci Sayin, Alî Arslan, Gulşen Erdogan, Muzaffer Avşar, and Îhsan Akyuz were elected as the new members of the board of management. The new members held their first meeting and each member was assigned certain duties. 


They also held a meeting with the members of the Institute and the committees below were formed:

The Committee of Education and Training

The Kurdish lessons are arranged and managed by this committee. All the teachers giving Kurdish lessons are members of this committee. As for the development of our educational and training studies, we aim to provide our teachers with in-service training and continuous development in the language. The Committee of Education is going to organize this.
Extra audial and visual materials will be prepared. As well as these, we have been working on a journal of education which will be released twice a year for the students and teachers of Kurdish classes.


As well as the lessons on the dialects of Kurmancî and Kirmanckî (Zazakî), lessons on the dialect of Soranî will be given soon at the institute. It’s known that there are numerous historical documents on Kurds in the Ottoman archives. Some studies have been done on these, for example, Kerem Soylu, one of the members of the institute, has written two books named “Mesail-i Mühimme-i Kurdistan” and “Osmanlı Belgelerinde Dersim ve Civarı”. In addition, the Kurdish Studies Group has also been studying on this and has published a few books one of which is about the “Rojî Kurd” and was published by the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul. However, it is necessary to have more studies in this area, so the number of the people who can read and transcribe these documents should increase. That’s why we are planning to have workshops on the Ottoman language and alphabetC at the Institute.

The Committee of Consciousness of Protection and Improvement of Kurdish Language
This committee will be responsible for raising awareness on the protection and development of Kurdish language by organizing conferences, seminars, panels, etc.

The Committee of Translation and Interpretation
The Committee of Translation and Interpretation will work on translation studies to improve its members’ translation skills and will cover all the translation work that are to be done by the Kurdish Institute.



ZEND
An editorial board was designated for the publication of the journal ZEND. From now on, the journal will be published within the knowledge and control of this board with the editorship of Ali Arslan.

PUBLICATION
The books of the instiute which are sold out and the new books that are approved for publishing will be published soon. We will start with the publication of the coursebook “Hînker Level 1” so that it will soon be accessible for those who want to start studying on Kurdish.
That’s all about our current works at the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul. We wish you the best till our next meeting.
In the name of the Board of Management of the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul
Samî TAN (Co-chairman

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