Mother Tongue

Kerning Cultures

Kerning Cultures Network

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.9 • 529 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you preserve a language when your government is actively trying to erase it?

Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur linguist who was trying to stop the Chinese government from replacing Uyghur with Mandarin. He had been studying the language's history, teaching Uyghur to younger students and writing books in Uyghur. But when the Chinese government began forcibly detaining Uyghurs in Xinjiang, his work got much riskier. Then, they came for Abduweli himself. This week on Kerning Cultures, Abduweli's fight to preserve his mother tongue.

This episode originally aired in August 2019.

Special thanks to Abduweli Ayup and his family for sharing their story, and to Arienne Dwyer and Timothy Grose.

You can find a transcript for this episode here.

This episode was produced by Durrie Bouscaren and Alex Atack, with editorial support from Dana Ballout and Hebah Fisher. Sound design by Mohamed Khreizat. Fact-checking by Zeina Dowidar. Kerning Cultures is a Kerning Cultures Network production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, it's Dana. We're taking a break this week while we put the finishing touches on our next few episodes.
0:10.5	But in the meantime, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite stories from the Kernan Culture's archives.
0:16.0	It's a story about Abdul Wali Ayyayyop. He's a Uyghur linguist who left his home city in northwest China to Istanbul
0:22.0	after being detained and tortured by the Chinese Communist Party. It's about his fight to keep his
0:27.3	language alive while the Chinese government are trying to eradicate it. The story originally
0:33.1	aired in 2019 and was hosted by my co-host, Hiba Fisher. You'll hear her first.
0:39.8	Our story today takes place in Turkey by way of China.
0:44.0	But we're going to start here in a quiet residential district of Istanbul called Zayton Bernou.
0:51.0	The neighborhood is probably one of the more diverse.
0:53.9	I mean, Istanbul is pretty diverse, but Zayton-Bernou might be one of the most diverse. The neighborhood is probably one of the more diverse. I mean, Istanbul is pretty diverse, but Zayton Bernou might be one of the most diverse.
0:58.2	This is reporter Dori Buscaran.
1:00.5	Because it's a neighborhood that a lot of people go to when they first move here.
1:05.5	So you've got a lot of Syrian refugee families, you've got people who are coming from Southeast Asia or different countries in Africa.
1:14.5	And there's one kind of street or a couple streets that are predominantly Uyghur families.
1:20.6	Uyghurs are a largely Muslim minority in China and a part of China called Xinjiang, which is to the far northwest of the country.
1:28.2	In Istanbul, the Uyghur community is made up of roughly between 30 to 50,000 people.
1:33.7	And in this part to Zayton Burno specifically, if you walked along its streets, you'd notice a lot of Uyghur-owned shops.
1:40.6	And so you've got this bookshop and publishing house.
1:44.9	You've got a construction company that's owned by a Uyghur gentleman.
1:48.9	You have a halal butcher where the guy behind the counter speaks Uyghur and also sells traditional vinegars and noodles.
1:57.1	And it's really a community.
1:59.0	I mean, people are able to feel a little bit like they're at home.
	...

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