Residents of Nashville, Tennessee are studying Kurdish for free through a program co-sponsored by Nashville State Community College (NSCC) and Indiana University’s Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR) as part of a Title VI Language Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
Nashville, TN is currently home to one of the largest Kurdish communities outside Iraq, with an estimated population of 20,000 Kurds concentrated in a few of the city's neighborhoods. As Dr. Patricia Armstrong, Dean of English, Humanities, and Creative Technologies at NSCC, notes, “If you think about 20,000 people in a couple of zip codes, that's a high concentration. And that is a solid community.” It was this reason that NCSS and CeLCAR came together to develop a program intended to provide a meaningful opportunity for community members to communicate more effectively with their Kurdish-speaking neighbors, colleagues, and family members.
NSCC and CeLCAR hope to expand their Kurdish language collaboration into Nashville-area high schools, further strengthening community connections and supporting the Mayor’s “New Americans” initiative by promoting language access and cultural understanding.
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