BASELINE STUDY

Similarly, the mother tongues of the parents of the children were concentrated in the same
language groups. The findings concerning mother tongues show that the families participating
in the seasonal agricultural migration speak in their mother tongue in their homes,
and that they are members of the Kurdish, Arab and Zaza ethnic groups. The hypothesis
that “poverty coincides with ethnicity” is one of the arguments for ‘new’ poverty. The findings
of the research support this theory. The actors of the ‘new poverty’ are ethnic, poor
children.
The research findings show that 98.6% of the children whose mother tongue is a language
other than Turkish can speak Turkish. The linguistic capital of these poor children who are
able to speak more than one language stems from the fact that they speak their mother
tongues with their families while the official language at school is Turkish. However, these
language skills are often disregarded and use is not made of them in education. Yet to
speak many languages is to have more than one culture. Languages such as Arabic or Kurdish
are among the important languages of our day. In the labour market, speakers of such
languages are considered skilled and advantageous. However, although these are skills
acquired at a very young age, the language skills of the seasonal and migratory agricultural
child labourers are not made use of in education. This is an important loss of human capital
throughout the country.
Table 2: Mother Tongue of Children by Province
Province of Research
What is your mother tongue? Adana-Mersin Ordu Şanlıurfa Yozgat Total
No. 1 5 19 1 26
Turkish
% 1,0 5,1 18,4 2,0 7,4
No. 70 67 61 43 241
Kurdish
% 71,4 67,7 59,2 87,8 69,1
No. 26 0 22 4 52
Arabic
% 26,5 ,0 21,4 8,2 14,9
No. 1 9 0 1 11
Zaza
% 1,0 9,1 ,0 2,0 3,2
No. 0 18 1 0 19
Other
% ,0 18,2 1,0 ,0 5,4
No. 98 99 103 49 349
Total % 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0 100,0
33