Language Conflict

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorUniversity, Bachelor's August 2001

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Today when the world is observed, it is clear that there are many conflicts due to linguistic problems. It does not matter which part of the world considered; Africa, Europe, Middle East etc., everywhere languages cause lots of problems and conflicts. But what was the purpose of the first human beings? To leave people one more reason to make a conflict? Not exactly, their aim just to make their communication more simple. Firstly they purely sounded some simple sounds to express themselves and to conduct their opinion to each other, but thereafter slowly they started to make these sounds much more complicated with putting these sounds in order and by producing letters and words. After this process had ended they made up alphabet and writing. All of these, have created language. While human beings' population has been growing very fast, there have been many new languages have been appearing in human history.

In the result of this fast production of the languages, language started to be part of identity for specific cultures. When a powerful country wanted to assimilate another, first they changed their language which was happened in Soviet Union. Russia changed other countries' language to assimilate them easily. There are many different language conflicts on the world too, such as Kurdish-Turkish conflict suffering in Turkey or Hindi-Urdu languages in India.

First I want to deal with language conflict which has been suffering in Turkey. Even though the linguistic difference between Turkish and Kurdish is minute, because of some reasons or bad intends, this difference is used as a vehicle to occur a conflict to damage Turkey Republic. Almost there is no difference in alphabet and there is only little difference in speaking and pronunciation. On the Turkish lands there had been no hostile between Turkish people until a group of terrorist started to use this language weapon in the beginning of 1960s or 1970s. Both Turkish and Kurdish people had been speaking which language they want and had been writing Turkish, which is official language of Turkey. But after PKK, which claims that they are freedom fighters, started to provoke Kurdish people for some ideological ideas such as damaging to Turkey or making it weak there had been linguistic conflict occurred. Especially after European countries and US started to support this terrorist group by the help of the human rights council, it was very hard to resolve this conflict for Turkey. The conflict seems has been resolved recently, but this does not mean it will not happen again in the future.

What about Hindi and Urdu languages? The conflict seems same as happening in Turkey. Because their linguistic difference between Hindu and Urdu is minute too. But only the difference between Turkey's language conflict is these two languages' alphabets are different like in Yugoslavia, there is also used two different alphabet like Latin and Cyrillic. However there is again the same problem there are two ideologies that each language denotes. Urdu symbolises the ideology of a separate Muslim nation arose in northern India, in the other hand Hindu denotes Hindu religionists people. There is a identity conflict due to language, both sides want to get rid of other alphabet's words from their own alphabet.

Finally it is clear that for humanity it is easy to use everything to turn into a conflict. While every human soul includes a part of devil side, unfortunately it will probably cause many conflicts so often. Language is not only problem for conflicts, people are the main problem that cause so complicated conflicts. Actually there is no way to prevent these conflicts which come from nature of human beings. We should always have two or more point of views to decide efficiently and in the result of this conflict occurs. This is the evident of why we cannot remove conflict from our lives.