“Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide

Some recent images from around the globe: protest rally in Rome with a banner featuring the slogan “donna vita libertà” (“woman, life, freedom”); cover of the French newspaper Libération with the bilingual Persian-French headline “زن زندگی آزادی/femme, vie, liberté” (“woman, life, freedom”); fans at a match between two major German soccer teams holding a banner with the Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” (“woman, life, freedom”); video of feminist protesters in Chile chanting in Persian and Spanish “zan, zendegi, azadi; mujer, vida, libertad” (“woman, life, freedom”); poster for a rally in Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country, with the bilingual Kurdish-Basque headline “jin jiyan azadi/emakume, bizitza, askatsuna” (“woman, life, freedom”).

The list could go on: in a few hours of internet search, I compiled a 100+ corpus of the slogan used on banners, posters, billboards, graffiti, in digital art, chants, and as hashtag – in 23 different languages. Since a few days ago, the slogan even has a Wikipedia entry, currently in English, Persian, and Kurdish.

That a protest slogan from outside the Anglosphere is spreading globally and multilingually is highly unusual. So, let’s explore the story of the slogan that is travelling against the global linguistic current!

International slogans

The word “slogan” comes from the Scottish Gaelic word “sluagh-ghairm”, which mean “battle cry”. Essentially, slogans are linguistic tools of mass mobilization. This means that the limits of a language are the limits of mobilization. For many mass movements – those devoted to local issues or those with national ideologies – this is not a problem. But movements that seek to mobilize across linguistic boundaries face a challenge.

The international workers’ movement has dealt with the linguistic problem of global mass mobilization through translation. One of the globally most recognizable slogans – “Workers of the world, unite!” – is a translation of a German original (“Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!”) and the Wikipedia entry for the slogan lists around 50 additional versions in other languages.

With the global spread of English, some slogans, particularly commercial ones, have taken a different route. Instead of translating slogans into all the languages of target markets, the English version is used internationally. Famous examples include Nike’s “Just do it”, Apple’s “Think different”, or Uniqlo’s “Made for all.”

A spin-off of “Made for all” can be found on the “Peace for all” t-shirt range, Uniqlo’s charity sale range. The example illustrates how commercial and political slogans have come to shade into each other under the hegemony of English. One of the many global roles of English is that it has also become the language of choice of global mobilization. Political slogans from the Anglosphere spread readily across linguistic borders, too. “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” offer powerful recent examples.

Non-English slogans in the global arena

While “Black Lives Matter” and “Me too” readily captured the imagination of masses outside the USA, it is difficult to think of a non-English slogan that achieved any level of international recognition in recent decades.

The slogans of major protest movements have certainly been widely translated into English: for example, one of the main slogans of the Arab Spring, “الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”, often appeared on banners as “the people demand removal of the regime”; or the main slogan of the Hong Kong Uprising “光復香港，時代革命” was often accompanied by “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”

The function of these English translations, however, was not so much mobilization of non-Arabic-speaking or non-Chinese-speaking groups. Instead, their function was to draw international attention to these movements.

Kurdish origins of “Women, life, freedom”

The Kurdish slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” has been around for about 20 years. It is closely associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a socialist armed guerilla movement operating in the Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Women’s liberation has been a cornerstone of the ideology of the PKK, and the slogan “jin, jiyan, azadî” speaks to a radical commitment to women’s liberation (“jin”), ecology (“jiyan”), and against state oppression (“azadî”).

"Jin, jiyan, azadî" comes from militant, anti-system women. It's a universal slogan – but it mustn't be stolen by the dominant liberal power system.

JIN cannot rely on capitalism and the state.
JIYAN means being against all war and arms trade.
AZADÎ is opposing colonialism.

— Dilar Dirik☀️ (@Dlrdrk1) October 1, 2022

The slogan first attracted a larger audience outside Kurdistan in the mid-2010s when a PKK-affiliated all-female militia unit in the Syrian civil war, YPJ, was part of the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region, Rojava.

The YPJ was the subject of various documentaries and attracted some outside support, particularly in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. And that is how the slogan began to spread. It could now be found in Kurdish and English as the title of a 2017 photo essay, in Kurdish and Italian as a book title and on the banner of a 2017 protest march in Rome, in Kurdish on a mural in Vienna, in Kurdish, German, English, and Turkish in a 2014 tweet, in Kurdish, English, German, French, and Turkish in a 2019 art exhibition, and in Kurdish and French in the 2018 movie “Les filles du soleil” (“Girls of the sun”).

“Women, life, freedom” extends from Kurdish to Persian

The internationalization of the slogan in the 2010s kept it firmly associated with the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. The traditional homeland of the Kurdish people is spread out over Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and in all these countries Kurds have faced various levels of oppression since the end of the First World War.

With the recent exception of the autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq, the Kurdish language is largely excluded from public life in the Kurdish areas and is not taught in schools. The linguistic oppression of Kurdish has been most extreme in Turkey, where it was even prohibited to be spoken in the home and could not even be named.

The situation of the Kurds in Iran is somewhat different from the other three main countries due to strong ethnolinguistic and cultural ties between the Kurds and other peoples of Iran. Kurdish and Persian belong to the same language family and share many similarities, in contrast to the majority languages of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria (Turkish and Arabic).

It is against this background that the transformation of the slogan from Kurdish to Persian must be understood: Kurdish “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and Persian “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” share obvious similarities. The words for “woman” (ژن/jin, زن/zan) and “life” (ژیان/jiyan, زندگی/zendegi) are etymologically related across the two languages, and the word for “freedom” (ئازادی/azadî, آزادی/azadi) is the same in both languages.

The catalyst for the adoption of the slogan in Persian was the death of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody in Tehran on September 16, 2022. “Women, life, freedom” became the battle cry of a movement against state oppression in Iran and beyond.

Transformations in the global linguistic hierarchy

The global linguistic hierarchy can be understood as a pyramid: the vast majority of languages play no official role anywhere in the world and, as peripheral languages, are relegated to the home and community. Above this large layer sits a smaller layer of a few hundred central languages with an official role in a nation state. On top of the hierarchy sit one single language only, English, the hyper-central language of globalization.

English is exceptional because it can be used for home, national, and international communication. English can fulfill all the linguistic needs of a speaker, and an English speaker may never have to learn another language.

Speakers of a peripheral language, by contrast, cannot afford to remain monolingual. To get an education, to communicate nationally and internationally, they have to learn other languages.

The same is true for slogans. An English slogan can mobilize locally, nationally, and internationally.

Neither a Kurdish nor a Persian slogan offers such affordances. Peripheral to the global language system, Kurdish slogans can only mobilize locally. For national mobilization, they need to be translated into a language higher up in the hierarchy, Persian in this case. And for international mobilization, it needs to be translated yet again, first and foremost “up” into English, but also laterally into other languages.

Content worth listening to

The global linguistic hierarchy is not only about form (which language?) but also about content (what matters?).

Content in English is widely considered worth paying attention to, as is evidenced by translation statistics: English is the source language of the overwhelming majority of translations in the world. It is the source language of 1,266,110 translated documents recorded by UNICEF. The second most frequent source language is French, and it is far behind with 226,123 translations.

Content translated from Persian is minuscule in comparison although it still ranks as the 34^th most frequent source language with 3,041 documents. There are no statistics for Kurdish – translations from that language are so rare.

Seen against the global linguistic hierarchy, the story of “ژن ژیان ئازادی/jin, jiyan, azadî” and “زن زندگی آزادی/zan, zendegi, azadi” is quite miraculous: the slogan has been swimming against the global linguistic tide. It is meaningful to audiences around the globe who have been using it both in the original language and in translation.