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Uyghur Academy
May 25, 2024
Uyghurs’ efforts to protect their mother tongue recognized in US Congress
The Uyghur Academy, Campaign for Uyghurs and Uyghur Transitional Justice Database jointly organized a conference on “Preservation of Language and Uyghur Genocide Visualized in 3D” on May 22, 2024 at the US House of Representatives. At the conference, the five-part book series “Uyghur Language and Literature Course” prepared and published by the Uyghur Academy and “Uyghur Prison Camps in Virtual Reality” prepared by the Uyghur Forensic Archive were introduced.
Although the Chinese government defines what it does at the international level as “fighting terrorism and extremism” in the political and economic sphere, the reality revealed by the Uyghur Academy and the Uyghur Forensic Archives at the conference once again revealed how much China is lying.
It is known that one of the main targets of the massacre in the Uyghur region is the Uyghur language. According to Dr. Rishat Abbas, President of the Uyghur Academy, at a time when the Chinese government is carrying out the destruction of the Uyghur language as the main target of the current genocide, a project to prepare Uyghur mother tongue textbooks to help preserve Uyghur language and culture in the Diaspora was launched several years ago with the financial support of organizations such as the American Institute of Peace.
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The five-part “Uyghur Language and Literature Course” book series, a collaborative effort of Uyghur intellectuals abroad, is a series of books that covers topics ranging from the beginning literacy level to advanced reading and would normally be considered sufficient for several years of native language instruction.
The collective work of Uyghur intellectuals in the diaspora on this textbook series demonstrates the determination of the Uyghur people to confront China’s cultural genocide. Gulnar Aziz, a Uyghur language teacher at Harvard University and one of the authors of these books, said, “The Chinese government has removed the Uyghur language from the field of education. These textbooks are a first and important step in our struggle against their goal of destroying our language.”
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Abdulhamid Karahan, an official of the board of directors of the Uyghur Academy, gave a brief explanation of the preparation process of this book series. According to him, the preparation of this book series was the product of many years of hard work. Initially, a special committee was formed for the project. Academic symposia on “preserving the Uyghur language while the genocide continues” were organized in places such as the United States and Turkey. Meetings were organized many times to further discuss and debate specific studies on this topic. During this process, consensus was reached on the content, structure and other aspects of the book, as well as on basic principles such as “the textbook should be authentically Uyghur, the spirit of East Turkestan should be included in the textbook, and reading, writing and listening should be integrated”. Thus, the first version of the five-part “Uyghur Language and Literature Course” series was published.
Commenting on the work, Scott Worden, Director of the Central Asia Division of the American Institute of Peace, emphasized that this work is an important step in preserving a beautiful language doomed to extinction in the wake of genocide, and therefore expressed their strong support for all the work of this project.
Numerous Uyghur mother tongue schools have now been established around the world and mother tongue classes have long been offered, but the lack of textbooks remains a major challenge. The publication of the “Uyghur Language and Literature Textbooks” is an important step in filling this gap.