Page 310 - America's Failure to Perceive the PKK

There are a considerable amount of people who doesn't speak
Kurdish because they are ethnically Turkish and also a great
majority of people who speak very little Kurdish or Zaza lan-
guage even though they are ethnically Kurds or Zazas; thus they
all speak only Turkish in their daily lives. The fact that the local
tradesmen stick to Turkish when they put on job postings, despite
all the efforts carried out by the local municipalities to make
everything Kurdish, demonstrates that the efforts to make every-
thing Kurdish is not a natural process but a political one. 123

This is of course a political process. No ethnic
group living on these lands ever since the
Ottomans made it a point to distinguish
themselves with their mother tongues.

Although the Ottoman state consisted of
a large variety of ethnic groups who
were completely different from one
another, the official language of the

308 America's Failure to Perceive the PKK