Birgul Yilmaz

University of Reading · School of Literature and Languages

In this article I report on results of a Matched Guise Tests (MGT) study investigating attitudes towards Bohtan (BHKr) and Maraş Kurmanji (MRKr) spoken among the UK diaspora. I focus on BHKr, which I use to refer to the Kurmanji that is identified as “good Kurmanji”, also referred to as “academic”/ “proper”, and MRKr to refer to the Kurmanji that i...

Separated from Turkey by a ten-kilometer channel, Lesvos Island has received 45% of the refugees who arrived in Europe in 2015. An agreement called the EU-Turkey Statement signed in March 2016 led to the containment of refugees in hotspots, camps and shelters. Through this statement, the so-called Balkan route has been closed and refugees, includin...

This paper deals with the management of unaccompanied child migration. A legal framework laid out in international law aims to give internationally recognised human rights to children. These legal texts (re)invent the label of “child”, and more specifically, of “unaccompanied child”. This is a legally prescribed lexical label that discursively prod...

Drawing on Linguistic Ethnography (LE), this paper reports on the methodological issues that emerged from a large multi-sited, interdisciplinary research project carried out in a refugee camp called Southside Camp on Lesbos island, between October 2016 and July 2017. The project sought to identify the educational and language needs of refugees resi...

This paper discusses the construction of the linguistic repertoire and the ways in which it is shaped in connection to space - in the context of im/mobility and institutionalisation as part of the asylum procedure in a transit shelter for unaccompanied minors on Lesvos Island in Greece. The article examines a young person’s (Amir, aged 17) linguist...

This article investigates the way that Kurdish language learners construct discourses around identity in two language schools in London. It focuses on the values that heritage language learners of Kurdish-Kurmanji attribute to the Kurmanji spoken in the Bohtan and Maraş regions of Turkey. Kurmanji is one of the varieties of Kurdish that is spoken m...