The Sur Municipality in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır began offering education in Kurdish in addition to Turkish in the 2012-2013 academic year at the municipality's education center, an ntvmsnbc.com report said on Friday.

The municipality previously made its name heard in the media with its multilingual local governing practices -- groundbreaking in Turkey -- including its latest initiative of paying an extra TL 25 per month to employees who speak Kurdish, Armenian or Syriac.

Now the municipality offers math, physics, history and philosophy courses in Kurdish as well as in Turkish at an education center named after Mehmet Geren, a teacher killed in an unsolved 1992 murder. The center currently offers education to 150 students.

The philosophy teacher at the center, Abdullah Demirbaş, said that offering public services in mother tongues will not divide a country, but on the contrary, will unite it further. “The fear that offering public services in locals' mother tongue will divide the country is ungrounded. We wish everyone living in Turkey could be educated in their native language,” he stated.

The use of the Kurdish language in public was banned following the 1980 military coup, and an unofficial prohibition on the language remained in place for many years even after the ban was officially lifted in 1991.


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