Struggling Together for a Digital Future: The Efforts of Kurdish Communities to Develop the Digital Sphere
In the digital age, open source technologies and digital culture are shaping the world, and one individual, Mohammed Sardar, is making a significant contribution to this revolution, particularly for the Kurdish community.
The Kurdish language, spoken by over 40 million people across Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, faces numerous challenges, both online and offline. Economic difficulties in regions where most Kurds reside make it hard for people to contribute to open platforms like Wikipedia without financial support. Moreover, there is a scarcity of trained individuals in Kurdish digital content creation and language technology.
Despite these hurdles, the internet has revealed a gap in Kurdish-language content compared to languages like English and Arabic. This gap motivated Mohammed Sardar to engage in digital activism, aiming to bridge this divide and empower the Kurdish community with knowledge, culture, and technology in their own language.
Mohammed Sardar's journey began during his childhood, where reading materials in Kurdish ignited his emotional connection to the language. Today, he is one of the co-founders of the Kurdish Wikimedians User Group and a regular contributor to the Chawg podcast, which focuses on open source technologies and digital culture.
Kurdish is divided into two main dialects, Sorani and Kurmanji, written in different scripts (Arabic and Latin), requiring content to be produced or adapted in both dialects. The lack of universally accepted writing standardization for Kurdish has hampered efforts to make digital content available in the language.
To address this, a long-term annual program can be implemented, covering workshops, fun competitions, and prizes for creating content in Kurdish. Such a program would encourage young people to take pride in their language and use it more often. Additionally, universities and organizations can support the Kurdish language by involving students in projects that create Kurdish content in various subjects, not just literature.
Online, Kurdish is considered a low-resourced language with limited support in many mainstream technologies. More Kurdish content that speaks to young people, such as music, movies, books, and other entertainment, is needed to engage them in learning and using the language. In the current Iraqi Kurdish region, organizations working on the collection and preservation of books, writings, and Kurdish media include Kurdish cultural institutions and libraries, but specific organization names are not explicitly mentioned in the provided search results.
In countries like Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurdish language has faced challenges such as bans and heavy restrictions. Despite these obstacles, Kurdish is used in daily life and local media offline, but its role in formal education varies. The creation and expansion of Kurdish-language resources online can help counteract these restrictions and provide a platform for the Kurdish community to share their culture and knowledge.
Mohammed Sardar's goal is clear: to help create and expand Kurdish-language resources online so that Kurdish speakers can access knowledge, culture, and technology in their own language. His work is a testament to the power of digital activism and the potential it holds for underrepresented languages and communities.
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