Foreign language lessons: dispute over Turkish as a new school subject

Hesse's pupils should be able to choose Arabic as their second or third foreign language for the first time in 2023, and the range of courses in Polish, Chinese and Portuguese will be expanded according to the will of the state government.

However, Turkish and Greek are excluded as foreign languages, which has led to outraged reactions from Turkish clubs and associations, as well as parts of the opposition, in recent weeks.

There is talk of ignorance and discrimination.

In the Hessian state parliament, Minister of Culture Alexander Lorz (CDU) defended the decision on Thursday.

However, he held out the prospect of another attempt at school in order to find out whether Hesse's students would even like to learn Turkish in school.

In an earlier school trial ten years ago, according to Lorz, there was little interest in Turkish as a second foreign language.

If a new attempt shows that there are enough students who want to learn Turkish, the introduction can be discussed.

Most spoken languages ​​in the world 

Hessen would like to further expand its school foreign language offer so that Hessen's students can overcome borders in a globalized world, explained Lorz, but limited: "We will only ever be able to teach a very limited number of the innumerable languages ​​of this world." Therefore, a selection must necessarily be made become. The decisive criterion is whether enough students are interested in it. "And not only those who already speak this language as their mother tongue or second language, because that is what the native language lessons are for," the Minister of Education continued.

Students would choose languages ​​that they would expect to benefit from in their future lives, which in turn is related to the meaning of a language. Among other things, this justifies a decision in favor of EU languages ​​and has nothing to do with arbitrariness or discrimination. Polish is a special case, but with the introduction of Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese, with the exception of the South Asian languages, the ten most widely spoken languages ​​in the world and all official languages ​​of the United Nations will be taught in Hessen's schools. The minister of education made it clear that the criterion for the introduction of a new language could not be the number of native speakers living in Hesse. "If you want to make a political soup here for transparent reasons,does multilingualism as much a disservice as it does integration, ”said Lorz.

The SPD parliamentary group had introduced a motion calling for Turkish and Greek to be included as additional foreign languages ​​in schools. Turgut Yüksel said: “For us as the SPD parliamentary group, it is a question of equal opportunities and the reduction of discrimination to revalue the languages ​​of origin that are often spoken in the population.” He complained: “Black-Green picks out individual languages ​​at random and acts on the reality of life of migrants. ”The Turks are the largest immigrant community in the country. Yüksel described the decision of the state government as disrespectful to Turks and Greeks, who had lived and worked in this country for more than 60 years. That is an institutional discrimination. The SPD application is also an offer to people with Turkish roots,to rebuild trust that was lost after the NSU murders and the murders in Hanau.