Ban on Kurdish letters to be lifted with democracy package

ISTANBUL

The use of the letters q, x and w has been banned in Turkey for 85 years and officials who used them in brochures and signboards have been convicted by Turkish courts in the past. DHA photo

The letters used in the Kurdish alphabet but forbidden in official documents in Turkey - q, x and w - will be open to use with the democratization package but will not be included in the Turkish alphabet, daily Radikal reported on Sept. 27.

The use of the letters q, x and w has been banned in Turkey for 85 years and officials who used them in brochures and signboards have been convicted by Turkish courts in the past. The three letters will be able to be used in names too as part of the democratization package which will be announced by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sept. 30. However these letters will not be included in the Turkish alphabet.

Those who previously used these three letters on Kurdish signboards, brochures or names were tried and penalized with two to six months of imprisonment for violating the Turkish Letter Law, which was enacted in 1928 and replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet. However, the Turkish alphabet excluded these three letters which are present in the Latin alphabet.

The High Court of Appeals approved a local court’s decision banning the use of q, x and w in Kurdish names given to people in 2004. The Interior Ministry also said that names including these letters would not be registered to people’s ID cards, referring to the High Court of Appeals’ 2004 decision.