Language, Identity, and Neo‐Imperial Power in Kurdistan and Ukraine: A Joint Review of Demet Arpacık's <i>Beyond Language</i> and Corinne A. Seals’ <i>Choosing a Mother Tongue</i>

While multilingualism has existed throughout human history, the modern pursuit of ethnolinguistic homogeneity—where minority or non-standard languages are construed as threats to political unity—is a relatively recent phenomenon, widely traced to the emergence of nation-states and their institutional structures in the aftermath of the French Revolution (see May 2017; see also Rampton et al. 2024, on securitization). Equally well documented are the struggles against the symbolic dominance of standardized languages—products of this process, often representing the authority of the nation-state—that became colonial languages through their official, administrative, and educational entrenchment. Communities have long resisted such dominance, seeking to maintain or revitalize their “languages” or indeed to challenge the very ontologies of what constitutes a “language” (Liyanage and Canagarajah 2024). The right to “speak one's own language” is therefore inseparable from broader struggles for dignity, agency, and equality. This principle lies at the heart of both Demet Arpacik's Beyond Language and Corinne A. Seals's Choosing a Mother Tongue, which each examine, in different ways, how speakers assert Kurdish and Ukrainian in the face of Turkish and Russian dominance. These two works address directly the intersection of language, power, and identity in post-imperial—or, more precisely, neo-imperial—contexts: one in the post-Ottoman space, where Kurdish has been systematically marginalized in Turkey1; the other in the post-Soviet space, where Ukrainian competes with the historical dominance of Russian in Ukraine. Beyond Language offers a critical, Foucauldian genealogy of how the Turkish state has historically governed Kurds (and their language) through denial, assimilation, and tokenistic recognition, while also examining the emergence of a Kurdish language movement since the 1960s. Choosing a Mother Tongue examines shifting language ideologies in Ukraine during and after the EuroMaidan protests (2013–2014) and the subsequent invasion by Russia, adopting a critical sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic lens. Taken together, these works demonstrate how language remains a crucial battleground in struggles over sovereignty, belonging, and justice, revealing both the enduring legacies of empire and the pressures of contemporary neo-imperialist conflicts in shaping linguistic identities. In what follows, I first situate each book within the broader scholarship in the field, then describe their analytical frameworks. I next provide a comparative overview of their contents, before concluding with a discussion of the books’ main findings, contributions, limitations, and avenues for future research. Demet Arpacık's Beyond Language contributes to a growing body of scholarship that situates minority and Indigenous language movements within broader frameworks of colonialism, state formation, and decolonial resistance. To appreciate the novelty of her research, it is useful to compare it with earlier projects on Kurdish as well as parallel studies of other minoritized or colonized languages in Europe and the Global South. Early work on Kurdish linguistics largely falls under what Arpacık terms “colonial linguistics,” produced by “Euro-colonial agents” and oriented mainly toward structuralist grammatical description, codifying languages as “objective” systems in order to render them usable for imperial administration, evangelization, and similar projects (Garzoni 1787; Jaba 1860). From the 1990s onward, however, Kurdish and Western scholars began to foreground questions of language rights and state repression, documenting the sociolinguistic consequences of assimilationist policies and the struggles for Kurdish-medium education (Hassanpour 1992; Hassanpour et al. 2012; Sheyholislami 2011). Yet, as Arpacık observes, most of these analyses interpret Turkish policy primarily through the lenses of nationalism or modernization. Her conceptualization of “colonial language governmentality” departs from this tradition by reframing Turkish linguistic practices as explicitly colonial, drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality (Flores 2013; Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2019) and postcolonial or decolonial thought (Scott 1999; Spivak 1994). In this way, she extends İsmail Beşikçi's (2004 [1990]) claim that Kurdistan constitutes an “international colony,” embedding that claim in contemporary debates on epistemic violence—knowledge systems that misrepresent, repress, and domesticate minoritized languages and speakers—and on linguistic justice. Therefore, Arpacık's framing resonates strongly with Indigenous struggles that treat language as central to projects of decolonization rather than mere cultural preservation. Comparable cases include research on Native American and Hawaiian immersion schools (McCarty 2013), Māori revitalization efforts in New Zealand (May 2012), and Andean language politics (de la Cadena 2015). Concepts such as “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1994) have been mobilized to analyze how state and academic knowledge systems marginalize Indigenous languages. Arpacık's study of Dibistanên Azad (literally “Free Schools” in Kurdish)—grassroots Kurdish-language schools established in 2014 during the peace negotiations—shows how, like Kura Kaupapa Māori schools and Hawaiian immersion programs, they enact feminist, ecological, and communal pedagogies that attempt to reimagine social relations beyond the nation-state; yet, after the peace talks collapsed, the Turkish state forcibly closed them in 2016, underscoring their vulnerability at the intersection of colonial domination and authoritarian nationalism. Other relevant research, though not always framed explicitly in decolonial terms, comes from European minority-language movements. The Basque case, for instance, demonstrates how language revitalization has been closely tied to political struggle, including periods of armed conflict (ETA) and subsequent transitions toward recognition within democratic states (Urla 2012). Similarly, research on Catalan, Welsh, Breton, Yiddish, and Lemko highlights how language activism can become institutionalized within regional autonomy frameworks, generating both revitalization and tensions around authenticity, essentialism, and the emergence of new speakers (Extra and Gorter 2008; Flors-Mas and Manterola 2021; Hornsby 2015; Woolard 2016). Kurdish activism also treats language as a political act, but it diverges in two crucial respects: first, the absence of meaningful autonomy or recognition within Turkey; and second, the persistence of criminalization—sometimes latent, sometimes overt—manifested in violent repression, the banning of political parties, and the imprisonment of elected officials. This contrast underscores Arpacık's argument that the Kurdish case cannot be fully explained through nationalist paradigms but requires a colonial analytic that situates Turkey as a neo-imperialist power. Corinne A. Seals’ Choosing a Mother Tongue makes a distinctive contribution to the study of language, politics, and identity by centring the lived narratives of Ukrainians during and after the EuroMaidan uprisings and the war with Russia. While earlier research on Ukraine has focused on Russification, state language policy, and regional divisions (Bilaniuk 2016; Pavlenko 2008; 2011), Seals turns instead to individual negotiations of belonging and self-positioning. Drawing on post-structuralist perspectives on identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Norton 2013) and narrative discourse analysis, she illuminates how speakers discursively account for their language use and even “change” their mother tongue as a political and affective stance rather than treating language as a fixed marker of ethnicity or nation. This approach resonates with comparative work on language politics in other conflictual or multilingual settings. Jaffe's (1999) ethnography of Corsica, Woolard's (2016) study of linguistic authority in Catalonia, and Charalambous et al.’s (2017) research on teaching Turkish in Greek-Cypriot classrooms, along with Kitis and Jegels' (2018) analysis of linguistic citizenship in South African protest speeches, similarly show how language ideologies are bound up with struggles over authenticity, loyalty, and imagined community. Likewise, O'Rourke and Walsh (2020) highlight how new speakers of Irish navigate competing authenticity claims, paralleling Seals’ finding that linguistic affiliation in Ukraine can be actively reconfigured in response to shifting political circumstances. These comparative cases suggest that, while the Ukrainian experience is historically specific, it shares broader dynamics with other contexts where language is inseparable from national imaginaries and political contestation. At the same time, Seals’ study contributes to wider debates in critical sociolinguistics about the entanglement of language, power, and identity under conditions of globalization and insecurity. Her emphasis on dialogism and positioning aligns with discourse-historical approaches to nationalism (De Cillia et al. 1999), micro-level work on constructing a collective (protest) identity (Serafis et al. 2018), and theorizations of language as a site of securitization (Rampton et al. 2024). By tracing how individuals negotiate loyalty and belonging in wartime Ukraine and in diasporic communities, Seals’ book both complements and extends this scholarship, offering a textured account of how language choices become moral-political acts with far-reaching consequences. Beyond Language adopts a critical ethnographic and decolonial framework, situating Kurdish language activism at the intersection of systemic suppression by the Turkish state and the rise of a broader Kurdish Liberation Movement. Arpacık grounds her analysis in fieldwork with Kurdish language activists and educators—particularly around grassroots initiatives such as Dibistanên Azad (Free Schools)—developing the notion of “colonial language governmentality” to describe the Turkish state's systematic regulation of linguistic life as a mode of colonial domination. Methodologically, the study combines genealogy—based largely on archival research—ethnography, and discourse analysis to trace both the longue durée of Turkish colonial language policies and the immediacy of contemporary activist practices. The data are diverse: radical Kurdish publications, political manifestos, regional newspapers, activist-produced textbooks, state policy documents, and media accounts, alongside ethnographic encounters in Diyarbakır and Istanbul. The eclectic corpus allows Arpacık to weave together historical processes with lived experiences. At its core, the book challenges liberal, depoliticized accounts of minority language rights with Arpacık tracing how Turkish policies toward Kurdish have historically operationalized forms of epistemic violence originating in European colonial–racial discourses. Against this backdrop, the Kurdish language movement is framed not only as a demand for linguistic recognition but as an anti-colonial project aimed at dismantling hegemonic ideologies of language, identity, and modernity borrowed by the Turkish state since its founding and consolidation over the 20th century. The analysis demonstrates how activists engage in what Arpacık terms a decolonial politics of language, reimagining Kurdish not simply as a bounded linguistic code but as a medium of autonomy, communal pedagogy, and radical democracy. The analysis in Choosing a Mother Tongue is framed within post-structuralist and social constructionist theories of identity, showing how identities are socially and discursively co-constructed within relations of power, with language choice serving as a key site of negotiation. Social constructionism here views reality and identity as contextually created, while post-structuralism adds a critical focus on power, and in identity Concepts such as 2013; Norton and and the of how Ukrainians in the of the Revolution EuroMaidan and the conflict with Russia. 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