Under Erdogan's watch, Turkey has eased restrictions on the use of the language, allowing defendants to use it in court cases, politicians to use it during campaigns, and prisoners to use it in jails. The government has even launched a Kurdish-language TV station, as well as elective courses in Kurdish in universities and schools.

For the Kurds, this is all well and fine, and a huge leap from an era when Turkey banned their language outright, but not nearly enough. "How can you have elective courses in your own language? How much sense does that make?" bristles Rahmi Kurt, an official from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Hakkari, a town in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast. What his people need, Kurt says, is public education in Kurdish.

A visit with one of Mukader Baran's introductory classes in Kurdish literature, at Hakkari University, makes it clear why. The course is an elective, one of the students confides, but Baran, the teacher, "makes sure that we take it." No one appears to mind. The young men and women appear engaged, interested, and alert. There's only one problem. Most of them might speak Kurdish, but they can't read it.

The students take turns making PowerPoint presentations on Kurdish literature. Baran talks about Evdale Zeynike, or, as she calls him, the Kurdish Homer. A few boys take a stab at reading a Kurdish poem in its original. Fezullah, from Mardin, a good 250 miles west of Hakkari, is shaking his head. "It's a course in Kurdish literature, but were doing it all in Turkish," he says dejectedly. Many students have to read the assigned books in their Turkish translation. Young Kurds, Fezullah says, might learn to speak their language at home, but to be able to read and write in it, and to remain literate in their own culture, they'll need it in school.

"When your whole education, from primary school until university, is in Turkish, learning to read and write in Kurdish isn't so easy," says Ümit Fırat, a Kurdish intellectual and Helsinki Citizens Assembly member, inside his Istanbul office. "We have 15 or 16 million Kurds in Turkey and out of those maybe 300 or 500, maybe a bit more, can both read and write in Kurdish," he says. "Thousands can read, but being able to write is a whole different story." (Vahap Coşkun, an academic at Diyarbakir's Dicle University, declines to hazard a similar estimate, but reasons that the figure is "very low.") The elective courses are a welcome first step, Fırat says, but the real problem is the lack of teachers. Even with new literacy programs launched by Kurdish civil society groups and a handful of universities, the number of qualified teachers is woefully inadequate. "Hopefully," he says, "these types of activities will flourish when the fighting comes to an end."

Without schooling in Kurdish, warns Altan Tan, a BDP deputy, the Kurds in Turkey will face the threat of complete assimilation. Already, he says, about 50 percent of Turkish Kurds, particularly the children of migrants from the southeast, don't speak any Kurdish. "Each year, this is going to increase: 51, 52, 55, 70 percent. In 20 years, it will be 80 percent." "They," he says, meaning the Turkish government, and switching to English, "want to melt the Kurds."