Kirkuk, North Iraq -- Tara Emad, 10, walks home after class, singing a song in her native Kurdish that she recently learnt at school.

The scene would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. During Saddam's reign, the only language taught and used in Iraqi schools was Arabic, the exception being the autonomous Kurdish region, of which Kirkuk - Tara's hometown - was not a part.

Thousands of children like Tara were deprived of the right to speak and be educated in their mother tongue, be it Kurdish, Turkoman or Assyrian.

As part of the Ba'ath party's attempt to eliminate ethnic diversity in Iraq, languages other than Arabic were mostly banned from schools, universities, media and public places.

For instance, in Kirkuk - which has a substantial Kurdish community, as well as smaller minority groups, such as Turkomans and Assyrians - schools delivered only one lesson in Kurdish, but only after 10th grade.

In 1974, the Iraqi government agreed to open several Turkoman schools, but reneged on the move after a year.

Following the fall of the regime in 2003, minorities were granted the constitutional right to be educated in their mother tongues.

It was essential that the likes of Tara attend a Kurdish school. She grew up speaking mainly Kurdish at home. But when she started school aged six, all the lessons were in Arabic - as a result of which she failed her first year.

"My teacher always reproached me for not speaking Arabic well," she recalled.

Now some of the lessons in her school are conducted in Kurdish, which makes it much easier for her to keep up.

After the fall of the regime, Iraqi provinces were given powers to run local education affairs, with support from central government. But Kurdish officials say the latter provided them with little backing for mother-tongue schooling.

Yousif Saeed, in charge of Kurdish studies at the Kirkuk education office, accuses the ministry in Baghdad of neglecting an important constitutional right of non-Arab nations.

"The ministry does not provide [Kurdish language] schools and departments with the necessary [education materials], nor with the teaching staff," he said.

The demand for classes in languages other than Arabic in the Kirkuk region is high. In 2007, 305 schools offered classes in Kurdish; 148 in Turkoman; four in Assyrian; while 700 taught only in Arabic.

Saeed pointed out that so far all Kurdish schools in Kirkuk are funded by the Kurdistan region's education ministry. It has allocated 4.5 billion Iraqi dinars for new schools, and pays the salaries of their staff, who number around 6,000.

The Turkoman schools suffer from the same shortcomings as the Kurdish schools. Farook Fuad Abdul Rahman, manager of Turkoman studies at the Kirkuk education office, stresses how important studying in their mother language is for Turkoman students, but also complains about a lack of support from central government.

He says textbooks and other educational materials used by Turkoman schools are provided by rich Turkoman donors.

For Fawziya Awanees, head of Assyrian studies at the Kirkuk education office, studying in one's native language is an important means of "reviving the heritage