Section 1: Language Use & Geography
Your Kurdish language - which variety you speak, how you use it, and where your community is located.
Kurdish is not a single language but a group of related varieties with different histories, orthographies, and situations. We recognize that the boundaries between them are not always clear and that not every speaker identifies with standard category labels.
Please describe your variety in your own words - a specific dialect name, a place name, a family tradition, or however you would naturally describe what you speak. There is no wrong answer here.
Almost all Kurdish speakers are multilingual, and the other languages in someone's repertoire shape how, when, and why they use Kurdish. Understanding which other languages Kurdish speakers use helps us understand the multilingual context of Kurdish communities.
How a person learned Kurdish - or is in the process of learning it - tells us about the transmission of the language across generations and the contexts in which it is kept alive or rediscovered. This is especially relevant for diaspora communities and heritage speakers.
How this could be identifying: A precise location marker, combined with your other answers, could narrow down your village or neighborhood - especially in smaller communities.
How we protect you: This feature is entirely optional. You can mark a general region rather than a precise address. For research publication, coordinates are rounded to reduce precision.
The interactive map lets you show us where your language community is located. Click to place a marker - you can add multiple locations (e.g., your home region and your current diaspora city). This can be more meaningful than simply listing country names.
Click anywhere on the map to mark a location. You can add multiple markers and give each one a label.
Understanding where and when you use Kurdish helps us identify the domains in which the language is most vital - and where it may be under pressure. A language used regularly at home but almost never at work or in public is in a very different situation than one used across many contexts.
If a context does not apply to you at all, you can leave that row blank.
| Context | Never | Rarely | Sometimes | Often | Always |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home / family | |||||
| Work or study | |||||
| Community gatherings | |||||
| Online / social media | |||||
| Religious settings | |||||
| Public spaces (shops, street) | |||||
Scroll right on small screens to see all options. The last row allows you to add a context we did not list.
Who you speak Kurdish with tells us about the social networks in which the language lives. A language spoken only within the immediate family is in a different situation than one used across a full social world - with friends, colleagues, and strangers too.
Whether and how Kurdish is used in writing is central to questions about language technology. Speech-based and text-based tools are very different, and which matters more depends on how the language is actually used in a community.
Kurdish is written in multiple scripts - primarily Latin in Turkey and the European diaspora, and Arabic script in Iraq and Iran. Which script(s) you use tells us which orthographic communities you belong to and which text-based technologies would be relevant to you.
Whether younger people speak Kurdish is one of the most important indicators of the language's vitality. Intergenerational transmission - or its absence - shapes everything from the variety's future to what kinds of support would be most useful.
Section 2: Your Language & Context
Your views on your language and the broader situation it exists within.
Different Kurdish varieties carry different social statuses within Kurdish communities themselves - not just in relation to dominant state languages. These hierarchies affect how people feel about their own variety, and what kind of standardization or documentation work communities actually want.
Your perception of whether the situation for your language is improving or worsening is itself a form of community knowledge. Researchers often rely on external metrics (number of speakers, institutional support) - but how the situation feels from inside the community may tell a different story.
We want to understand your personal relationship to your language, not just how often you use it. Kurdish can be a source of pride, a connection to family and place, a site of loss, ambivalence, or all of these at once. There is no right answer here.
How this could be sensitive: If you describe specific political experiences - particularly in Turkey, Iran, or Syria - the content of your answer could, in combination with other responses, reveal your identity or political views.
How we protect you: This question is entirely optional. We do not record IP addresses. Data is not shared with any government. Write only as much as you feel comfortable sharing.
The political situation has profoundly shaped Kurdish language use - through suppression, forced assimilation, periods of opening, and ongoing uncertainty. We ask this to understand these impacts from the community's perspective, not from official accounts.
Section 3: Technology & Research Wishes
What tools exist, what you wish existed, and what researchers should actually be doing.
Understanding what tools people already use helps us identify gaps and redundancies in what exists. It also tells us what "language technology" actually means in practice for Kurdish speakers today.
This is at the core of what we are trying to understand: what would be most useful to you? We do not want to assume we know the answer. Please think about what would make a real difference in how you use or maintain your language.
Examples to spark thinking (not a menu to choose from): voice assistant, better keyboard input, Kurdish-language learning app, machine translation, spell-checker, text-to-speech, Kurdish subtitle tool, OCR for Kurdish script, children's language learning games ...
We want our research agenda to reflect community priorities, not just what seems interesting to researchers or what is easiest to publish. This question is open-ended on purpose - please tell us what genuinely matters from your perspective, whether or not it fits neatly into a research category.
No closed answer set - just an open invitation. Please tell us anything you think researchers get wrong, miss, or simply do not ask about. This could be about the language itself, the community, the political situation, what past research has failed to understand, or anything else entirely.
Section 4: Your Background
A few optional demographic questions. All questions in this section are potentially identifying and are marked accordingly. I am grateful for any information you are willing to share, which helps me to get a better picture of the Kurdish language communities. I also understand and respect the wish to stay completely anonymous! Hence, feel free to skip this section, if you may be uncomfortable sharing such information.
How this could be identifying: Combined with your Kurdish variety, country, and other answers, your age range could help narrow down who you are within a smaller community.
How we protect you: This field is entirely optional. Results will only be published in aggregate form. No individual responses are published.
Age helps us understand how Kurdish language use differs across generations - for example, whether younger speakers have different experiences or attitudes than older ones.
How this could be identifying: Combined with your Kurdish variety and other answers, your country of residence could help narrow down who you are - especially if you belong to a smaller or less-represented community.
How we protect you: This field is completely optional. Results are only published in aggregate form.
Your country of residence helps us understand the very different contexts in which Kurdish is spoken - the experience of a Kurdish speaker in Germany differs enormously from one in Turkey or Iraq.
How this could be identifying: If you are from a country where Kurdish speakers face political risks (e.g., Turkey or Iran), this information - even in anonymous data - could be sensitive.
How we protect you: This field is entirely optional. We do not share data with any government or state actor.
Where you grew up often shapes your relationship to Kurdish more deeply than where you currently live - including which variety you speak, which script you learned, and what political context surrounded the language in your formative years.
Section 5: Stay in Touch
This section is entirely optional. If you would like to be part of what comes next, you can let us know here.
There are two scenarios in which we might contact previous survey participants:
- For clarification: If you provided information that is unclear or difficult to interpret, we may want to ask a follow-up question to make sure we understand your response correctly.
- For ongoing involvement: If follow-up research, a second survey, or community initiatives are started, we would like to inform previous participants and invite those who are interested to get involved.
If you choose "yes, but anonymous": results will be published openly, so you will be able to follow them publicly without providing any contact details.
How this identifies you: An email address is directly linked to a person. Unlike all other fields in this survey, your email address is not anonymous.
How we handle it: Your email address is stored separately from your survey responses and will only be used to contact you for the purposes described above. It will not be shared with third parties and will not appear in any published research output.
You can request deletion at any time by writing to christianschuler8989@gmail.com.
Providing an email address is not required even if you selected "open to contact" above.
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