The Language identity in Kurdish proverbs

Abstract

Despite the fact that language is an integral part of the personal and social identities of any nation, it contains other dimensions of national identity such as culture, religion, history and politics. It is a known fact that language is a national wealth because language is a source of memory, tradition, thought, feelings and passions of people. It is a historical archive of words, phrases, terms and expressions. In other words, it is the history of those ideas, events and feelings that have become words, sentences and terms that are preserved in language. Every expression in language signifies an idea outside of itself. Therefore, it is safe to say that language of any nation represents its true identity alive. This research has been conducted under the title “language Identity in Kurdish Proverbs”. Many language characteristics can be shown through research on the content of Kurdish proverbs. To do so, those proverbs have been selected that directly or indirectly represent language. In doing so, one can be familiarised with the Kurdish view of language in terms of its use, guidance and education. This research is an attempt to gather information about the Kurds by the Kurds themselves rather than external researchers. For that purpose, descriptive and analytics methods are employed to interpret the content of the proverbs that contain language identity. The incentive of the research is to uncover the verbal role of these proverbs in tracing the Kurdish language identity and in showing their Kurdish perspective on the concept of language.