Vatandaş, Türkçe Konuş: Language Ideology in the Work of Ziya Gökalp
In the Turkish intellectual Ömer Seyfettin' s short-story “ilk Düşen ak”, his protagonist lives a comfortable life as a well-to-do architectural professor in Ottoman Istanbul before suddenly being overcome by a mysterious illness. When he visits the doctor, he is told that he is suffering from “sinecure”: a loss of purpose from living too comfortably. He is told the cure is to fight for a cause[1]. After soul searching and reading everything he can get his hands on, the Protagonist discovers the principles of nationalism.
In Seyfettin's story, the protagonist's anxiety arises from an unusual identity crisis. For Seyfettin, this identity crisis is not born of self-doubt or personal failure; to the contrary, the character's successes are stressed. Rather, it is as if the character has failed to be interpellated: he has not been called on by any ideology as a concrete subject[2]. In the story he is unable give any response when his doctor asks him if he is either a patriot or an internationalist. His inability to become a subject is manifested as a symptom in the individual.
If this allegory seems fantastical, Seyfettin gave the following explanation as his motivation for writing the story:
After the Mesrutiyet, I had spoken with most of our "Great Leaders." Their collective thoughts were approximately reflected in the following summation: "Ottomanism is a composite nationality. Ottomanism is neither Turkism nor being Moslem. Every individual living under the Ottoman administration, without regard to national origin and religion, is a member of the Ottoman nation!" However, this idea was nothing but an illusion, a fantasy, born of brains produced by the non-nationalist education system of the Tanzimat period[3].
Seyfettin explains just how contradictory the attempts to conceive Ottoman identity were and how they ultimately failed in being able to interpellate subjects. By not being able to identify through cultural commonalities with its subjects, the Ottoman government was unable to extend its ideological hegemony.
Seyfettin was not alone in his diagnosis of the Ottoman's ideological shortcomings. His problematization of national identity was one of many issues taken up by him and other members of the Young Turks: a coalition of intellectuals and political activists who played a central role in the political upheavals of the early Modern era in Turkey. As alluded to in this story, the young Turks increasingly lost faith in the ideal of the Ottoman state and its fractured claim to legitimacy. Delimiting a new Turkish national subjectivity to replace the defunct idea of the Ottoman subject grew concurrently with the rising tide of national awakening in its provinces that had rendered this same Ottoman subjectivity obsolete.
Especially after the reinstatement of the constitution in 1908, the Young Turks and their official political apparatus, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) , increasingly used and supported nationalist politics even while formally adhering to Ottomanism[4]. Even before this, they had used new forms of print media to spread their political ideals and theories on modernism, nationalism, and the Turkish language. In this respect, the rise of modern Turkish nationalism bears out Benedict Anderson's claim of the centrality of “print-capitalism” in the formation of an “imagined” political community[5]. They had several different publications for propagating their political program and a vast political organization at the local level.
But in order for this print media to be effective as a means for communication with the masses, and to create a new ideological hegemony composed of “Turkish” subjects, the Young Turks were faced with the challenge of changing the Turkish language.[6] During the Young Turk period, Turkish had become a partitioned diglossia. One one hand was a highly ornate literary language crowded with not only words but entire grammatical constructions from both Persian and Arabic. On the other was the vernacular Turkish which varied from region to region. Reforming the language had practical, political, and ideological implications.
Under the Young Turks, from about 1908, much was done to simplify the newspaper language (with an eye to propagating Pan-Turkism both at home and in other Turkish-speaking countries) by eliminating alien "grammatical baggage" such as the Perso-Arabic izafet construction. From 1911 the literary movement known as the Genç Kalemler ("Young Pens") reinforced the trend away from an artificial literary language toward a written version of everyday speech.[7]
The Turkish language itself was seen as centrally important in debates among the Young Turks. Creating a new sovereign community of Turks was contingent on the existence of a shared language. In the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from a multi-ethnic empire to the Turkish nation-state, language was often a primary object of political and ideological scrutiny. There was a belated attempt by the Ottoman regime, later enthusiastically achieved by the Turkish Republic, at creating a “language regime” able to control and promulgate not only the primacy of Turkish, but also suppression of other competing languages. In understanding the relationship between politics and language reform, we should take a look at what is meant by a “language regime”.
A language regime is a political regime that seeks to control language to achieve political goals. According to Pool[8], an official language serves multiple functions. The first is the creation of a legitimizing claim to a regime by representing a specific language community. Another is modernization which is believed to only be achievable if coupled with a national language developed sufficiently to meet the challenges of administration. Finally, linguistic centralization is seen as essential to the functioning of a modern state. [9].
When looking at the case of the Turkish language regime, we clearly see these principles being enacted. Jacob Landau has shown how purification, reform, standardization, and lexical expansion were an essential precondition in the national project[10]. Yılmaz Çolak has mapped out how this project was carried over into early Republican Turkish politics and how the new Turkish language came to symbolize a conversion from imperial–religious to national–secular culture[11]. Balçık's work has shown not only the specifics of Turkish language policy in regards to education, the army, and civil life, but has also explored its antagonistic relationship with the Kurdish language up until the 1990's[12].
Just as any study of political regimes is incomplete without a reference to their corresponding ideologies, language regimes are intimately connected with language ideologies. When we speak of language ideologies, we are referring to how people conceptualize the sociolinguistic field and how they conflate political and moral concerns onto their attitudes about language. Language ideology entails simplifying the reality of who speaks what language, associating value judgments to certain languages as being more “civilized”, or ignoring the existence of certain languages all together. I agree with Woolard and Sheifellin's choice to emphasize that “the term ideology reminds us that the cultural conceptions we study are partial, contestable and contested, and interest-laden. A naturalizing move that drains the conceptual of its historical content, making it seem universally and/or timelessly true.[13]”
In inventing a new Turkish nationalist subjectivity, language ideology played a crucial role in the interpellation of subjects constructed around an identity based on language, shared history, and traditions[14]. Many parts of this identity were contested and language often proved to be the clearest cultural common denominator. Whereas what was meant by 'Turk' often involved an overlapping of religious, geographical, and social configurations, the spurious equating of Turkish language with Turkish national identity was seen by reformers as self-evident and non-controversial. It was also promoted as a uniting link over other cultural elements like religion because it offered no resistance to the government's modernist agenda[15]. An even greater impetus for the emphasis on language was the fact that unlike other social aspects, through a language regime, the language situation could be changed.
However, even in a country like Turkey where the link between language and national identity was strong, no language situation is ever completely homogenous. Every language involves its own set of inconsistencies, ambiguities and inconveniently contradictory facts which must be explained away by a language regime with an agenda[16]. Therefore, language ideology often employs a process of 'language differentiation' to try to delimit an imagined, contiguous, and uniform language specific to one single language community.
In their essay “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation”, Irvine and Gal claim that they:
find some similarities in the way ideologies “recognize” (or misrecognize) linguistic differences: how they locate, interpret, and rationalize sociolinguistic complexity, identifying linguistic varieties with “typical” persons and activities and accounting for differences between them.[17]
Irvine and Gal refer to this phenomenon as “language differentiation”. This is essentially a semiotic process; that is to say, it is an attempt to create a conviction that the link between a certain language and its speakers is anything but contingent. It was not enough for advocates of Turkish national identity to establish the physical borders of Turkish speakers. Nor did it suffice to standardize and propagate a new national language engineered from above (although this was certainly the case in the early republic). To create a national identity based on language worthy of mass appeal and acceptance requires the ideological conviction that said language was the direct symbolic kernel of an immutable social group. It required a subject to be know and be able to respond to an interpellation such as the one used by the Republican regime in one of its language campaigns: Vatandaş Türkçe Konuş! (Citizen, Speak Turkish)
Irvine and Gal recognize three semiotic processes in language differentiation: Iconicity, Fractal Recursivity, and Erasure. Each one describe a way in which a linguistic form is seen to be an index of a social group. They all serve not only to differentiate languages from each other, but to inject moral and political values into facts about languages themselves. In our case, language differentiation is the process by which a normative, “pure” version of Turkish is defined and then associated with and made to constitute the official Turkish subject. In the examples we will see, each time either the etymology or taxonomy of a feature of Turkish is proposed, it is laden with an interest to connect Turkish with a primordial past, argue that Arabic/Persian are alien and distorting elements in an otherwise rational and whole language, or that it is a hegemonic language among other splintered or primitive languages. This is done rhetorically, with the Turkish language used as a metonym for the Turks themselves: rational, sovereign, and the inheritor of a glorious but forgotten past.
Iconicity entails the proposition that there is some linguistic feature which at the same time acts as an iconic representation of a social group. That is to say that the structure or content of a language somehow mirrors a “social group's inherent nature or essence[18]”. The reasons for the structure of a language are explained beyond arbitrary historical evolution. It is as though only a language bears unmistakable cultural traces of its speakers. This process is especially prominent in the project of creating a national mythology. In an essentialist narrative of national genesis, creating a sense that a language was born of the same primeval origin as its cultural customs and practices aids in this process of iconization.
Fractal Recursivity is the “projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level”[19]. Differences are recognized and then carried over to other aspects to create new differences between two linguistic groups. This can include creating subcategories in opposition within an already existing contrast, or combining two oppositions but in opposition to something else. This concept is especially valuable in explaining nationalism because it shows how nationalities are born from a process of segmentation: a new national subject is formed when its language is distanced from its linguistic neighbors through language engineering. For example, in pursuit of a national literary language, Bulgarian language reformers chose to eliminate many Turkish words in a process called “register-stripping” thereby eventually creating further difference between two languages which had once shared many words in colloquial speech[20]. Register stripping was carried out to extremes by all other countries in the former Ottoman region in a process that can be described by as “complementary schismogenesis”[21]. In addition to physical population exchanges, the governments of this region sought ethnic purification in their own languages. Fractal recursivity can also imply using ways of understanding one relationship in analyzing another. By using European sociological paradigms for understanding difference in the Turkish sphere, intellectuals in Turkey practiced a form of fractal recursivity.
Lastly is the process known as erasure. This is oversimplification, explaining away, or simply ignoring the sociolinguistic field in order to render it compatible with the ideological presentation of its own hegemony. Irvine and Gal stress that incompatible elements can usually be ignored, as in the case of Kurdish, and only when it poses a threatening challenge to the language ideology's totalizing vision is the language situation transformed.[22]
In their article, Irvine and Gal refer to the work of ethnographers and linguists as well as the politicians and local agents of language ideology in order to show how social sciences are equally caught up in these semiotic processes of language differentiation. Even if they are not positioned inside of the political field in their observations per se, there is no gaze that is not positioned[23]. If this is the case, then we would most certainly expect to find clear evidence of this process in the work of someone who worked both as a political player and a sociologist specifically concerned with the national project.
Ziya Gökalp
Within the group known as the Young Turks was another group interested in issues of literature, language reform, and mass communication called the Young Pens (Genç kalemler) . Although working mainly during the late Ottoman period, their views on the Turkish language continued to have wide-ranging effects on language policy straight into the Republican period. Besides Ömer Seyfettin, Ziya Gökalp is also considered to be one of the most influential members of this group[24]. From an early age, he became interested and joined the CUP in 1910 at a time when it was an underground organization and was even imprisoned for ten months for his political activities[25]. At the same time, he was a voracious reader of European scientific output and through reading became a self-taught sociologist, even being appointed the first head of the sociology department at Istanbul University in 1912. After this followed the publication of numerous works on sociology which were widely read among the politically influential. He was continuously consulted for his views on political and cultural issues. His works on Turkish sociology and his theories on “the social ideal” blurred the line between politics and academia in Turkey.
This duality of political and scientific/educational roles was continued in Gökalp's life as he went on to serve in a myriad of roles as consultant, parliamentarian, and author. He was honorarily elected to the Grand National Assembly (1923-1927) where he served on the parliamentary committee on education. He prepared numerous reforms of the school system of the new republic in the curriculum and in its textbooks. He even participated in the writing of the constitution of 1924.[26] Although Parla stresses that Gökalp never held an official position in the government, his influence was more far-reaching that most politicians because of his work on education, publication, and especially because of the ideological influence of his ideas in both the late Ottoman and Kemalist period. He has been described as the ideologue of the CUP[27]. What's more, Gökalp himself was aware of his academic work as evolving along with the praxis of the political. It was meant to function in a dialectical relationship with the changing political situation.
in a nation faced with politicl and economic turmoil, he believed that the intelligentsia should concentrate on finding theoretical answers to practical problems. Heyd’s intepretation also stresses that, for Gökalp, philosophy as well as as political social theory merely served as agents of practical activity for national revival[28].
In the work of Gökalp, we are treated to a direct textual example of process of language differentiation both in the service of a sociological project and as direct political rhetoric. Because it works at the direct intersection of politics and sociology, and because its views so directly influenced language regime policy, the work of Ziya Gökalp works as an excellent example for studying Irvine and Gal's theory on linguistic differentiation. In order to examine these processes, I would also like to focus on three different works of sociology by Gökalp which were each written with a specific political purpose in developing the genealogy, content, and boundaries of Turkish language identity. There are examples of these processes in each work but for the sake of clarity each work will be paired with one process.
Iconicity in “Türk Töresi”
Published in 1922, Türk Töresi (Turkish customs) was written in order to “be able to present Turkism as a holistic ideology by showing the changes undergone in the social, political, economic, cultural and religious aspects of Turkish society, and to clarify their roots and sources”[29]. Gökalp was interested in creating a clear separation between Ottoman society and Turkish culture. He would go as far as to consider Ottomanism as “socially alien” and oppressive to the Turks who had their own unique national culture[30]. Ottomanism was not, however, the only alien culture under which Turks had lived. In the introduction of the book, he stresses that Turkish culture has been under the yolk of three different civilizations (Far East, Islamic, Western)[31] and in order to distill true Turkish culture one has to examine all three. In order to explain how Turks could have been incorporated into these various groups and shared in their traditions while at the same time still retaining their own cultural essence, Gökalp makes a distinction between 'national culture' and 'international civilization'[32]. A national culture is based mainly on concepts like 'shared consciousness', traditions, and most importantly, language. Especially for a group whose early history was marked by migration, Turkish culture is tied to social practices instead of any concrete geographical area. Gökalp claims that “ülkeden geçilir, töreden geçilmez” (country may be forsaken, but not custom)[33].
The introduction of Turk Töresi begins with the question “what do we mean by Töre (custom)”. He says that the word töre is often associated with the Oğuz clans of Turks which preceded the Seljuk and Ottomans but in reality it was used by other pre-Islamic Turkish clans. Using a source he shows that the word appears as “Törüg” as far back as the Orkhon inscriptions in Mongolia[34]. This creates a direct semantic link between the earliest known Turks, far before Islam, and those living in Ottoman Turkey. It is as if the word Töre itself is an artifact of primordial Turkish civilization. This artifact had been obscured by the infiltration of Arabic vocabulary into the language and at almost every step of his exposition Gökalp translates old Turkish words into their contemporary Ottoman (Arabic) equivalent. Sometimes these simple translations are inadequate, as the words have a richer and more historically complex meaning. In explaining the word Töre, Gökalp says that:
“töre” is not limited only to the meanings associated with “kanun” [Ottoman Arabic for law]. Along with written laws töre also includes those activities which are unwritten. In fact, in addition to legal customs (töre), there are also religious and moral customs. In that case Turkish custom refers to the collection of all the norms that have been passed down by ancient Turkish ancestors. The word “töre” can be considered to be the essence of the word “Turk”... “Turk” can also mean “with customs” [töreli]... the word “Turk” comes from the word custom.[35]
Here we see quite clearly the process of iconicity in the equating of words with culture through the use of etymology. Töre becomes the linguistic sign for an abstract concept of pure Turkish cultural practices, past and present. By readopting the word töre comes not only the addition of a more indigenous word to Turkish but with it an understanding of true Turkish culture free from the distorting influence of Islamic nomenclature. It is as if a word alone provides direct access to the heritage of Turkish ancestral norms. This heritage is not merely a closer connection to ancient social practices more in sync with the values of Turkish “shared consciousness” , but indeed the very “source” of what it literally means to be Turkish.
After explaining how different names have been used to identity Turks through the ages in Central Asia, Gökalp begins to explain the history of Turks in reference to Chinese Civilization. He explains their interaction and mutual adoption of customs. This is done because he makes constant comparison and tries to draw parallels between pre-Islamic Turkish and Chinese forms of religion and social life. Little evidence survives of this Turkish culture and in order to paint a complete picture of pre-Islamic Turkish civilization, he needs to fill in some of the gaps through references to other cultures. He alleges that even though the written record of ancient Turkish civilization is lost, Turkish religious, legal, and moral customs were heavily influenced by Chinese arrangements[36].
Gökalp begins by drawing parallels between ancient Chinese and Turkish naturism and its constellation of symbolic elements. He elaborates on the centrality of the “four elements” in the religion of the Tsin dynasty. This semiotic system is extended to Turkish religion mainly by relying on the basis of color symbolism[37]. For the four principle elements, Chinese and Turkish systems have corresponding animals, directions, and colors. Gökalp includes a table comparing each of these elements in old Turkish and Chinese naturalism. He comments by saying:
“The above arrangements show that in old Turkish, directions, seasons, and gods had their own colors. If we look at our modern language we can see traces of this:
In the north – Black sea
in the west- the Aegean (white) sea
in the south- the Red sea
in the east- the Blue sea (the Blue Nile)”[38]
As further evidence for the centrality of these four colors in the spiritual symbolism of ancient Turkish civilization, Gökalp points out that Turkish has added synonyms from Arabic for these four colors (Gök=mavi, ak=beyaz, kızıl=kırmızı, kara=siyah) but not for any others[39]. These original color names, he says, express spiritual situations. The Arabic synonyms, however, only express physical things. In addition several expressions are given to show how different the meanings are given the different color names. “You can say “Gök Tanrı” (sky/blue God) and “gök Türk” (sky/blue Turk) but not “Mavi tanrı” or “Mavi Türk”[40].
Iconicity is at work here when Gökalp tries to show how the naming of places in the Turkish realm is not a product of historical circumstance but rather implies that long lost religious symbols, deeply imbedded in the shared consciousness of Turks, is the source. His etymological conclusions are exercises in the ideological binding of “the social image and the linguistic image”[41]. That the names for water bodies and the structure of an ancient Turkish religious structure would be imputed to the Turkish language gives it an supposed semiotic hegemony. Showing the expressive superiority of one of two synonyms makes Turkish the only language able to express expressions and spiritual concepts central to Turkish civilization. It is as though the Turkish language is the epistemological lens through which Turks express their entire understanding of the physical and spiritual world. The fact that no direct reference to time is given in describing these concepts of elements or place give a sense that meaning is fixed irrespective to time; that direction and color have maintained a one-to-one correspondence as signifier throughout all of Turkish civilization. Suggesting that language and social symbolism are immutable by extension means that Turkish national subjectivity is eternal.
In a later section entitled “Spirits in Shamanistic Religion”, Gökalp makes another interesting exposition of the relationship of Ancient Turkish religious beliefs to Modern Turkish words. There is “tın” which is the corporeal spirit of each individual. Besides these are three more types of spirits which accompany humans much like theirs shadow would. “Eş” is the spirit found in all things. “Sur” is for breathing or animated objects like plants and animals. “Kut” is only reserved for humans. As with earlier concepts, Gökalp shows both the original, “pure” meaning of these words using their modern Ottoman equivalent and how they have survived in vernacular Turkish expressions.
“The word “eş” is now used to mean friend (refik, arkadaş) and is found in expressions like Yolda eş = yoldaş (on the road spirit = travelling companion)...it's equivalent in Arabic is “tâbia”... Nowadays instead of saying “so and so's eş” we use the word fairy (perisi).”[42]
In folk traditions, men are possessed by a fairy or spirit at important moments in their life such as marriage, the birth of children, and death. Therefore, one had to leave them isolated for such periods and not enter their homes whereby Turkish gets the word for threshold (eşik). “Kut” is translated as “mukaddes ruh” (holy spirit) and also by other Islamic words such as “Keramet” (miracle), “bereket” (blessings) and “kutsiyet” (holiness). Kut has a broader meaning than what is encapsulated by any one Islamic term. Examples of kut are also given in place names in Turkey. From a simple presentation of a shamanistic belief we are quickly shown the inseparable semiotic links between the Turkish language, the Turkish home and customs, and even geography.
Turk Töresi offers more information about the religion and hierarchical structures of pre-Islamic Turkish civilization and at each step works to show that this ancient history is still very much alive in folk customs (as opposed to Ottoman high-culture) and especially in the Turkish language. Ottoman synonyms are inadequate for representing the religious dimensions of this civilization and has imposed alien concepts which obscure a web of cultural references and practices. By better understanding the meanings of these words, we are meant to see that the Turkish language is not a provincial dialect but rather an ancient language which is representative of a religion much in the way that Arabic is emblematic of Islam. Even if this religion is no longer practiced, much of its symbolism and cultural practices live on in Turkish culture and language. What is important is to extend the ideological conception of Turkish as a language into a primordial past where it was formed free of Islamic or Western influences. If there was such an autonomous language, then it can be reconstituted and can become the kernel of an equally independent national identity.
Fractal recursivity in “Türkçulüğün esasları”
In investigating Gökalp's opinions on which language policy should have been adopted as a political program, we needn't look any farther than his work entitled Principles of Turkism (Türkçülüğün esasları). In it, Gökalp “clarifies the road map that the newly founded Republic would follow. It would be based on the doctrine of Turkism that had won out in the argument raging since the Tanzimat between three main ideologies seeking to form the basis of a new system”[43]. Gökalp writes systematically and extensively to give his opinion about a range of issues important to the formation of a nationalist program. This gives a more precise view of his ideological views in the form of a polemical text rather than as the outcome of a disputed political process. What is more, Gökalp spoke directly about language policy in “Principles of Turkism”. The second section begins with a chapter entitled “Turkism and Language”. It is meant to outline what general precepts that a moderate language policy should follow in reforming Turkish. There are several aspects to this reform which include both the stripping of redundant Arabic and Persian elements and the procedure for adapting new vocabulary. This section is divided into six subjects among which are titles that express oppositions : Written and spoken language, Arabic and Farsi words in the vernacular, Turkists and Language elitists, and New Turkish cultural advancement and refinement.
In the following arguments over what kind of Turkish should be chosen and under what principles it should be reformed, we can see fractal recursivity at work in trying to extend and create difference. In order to define a new Turkish language, Gökalp and others had to make clear what should be eliminated from it and what should be added. It had to be a modern language with an independent source of derivational morphology. It could no longer be diglossal or semantically redundant. The source of these normative expectations were often arbitrary criteria and ideological judgements used to sever the language from its Islamic past and realign it with the West and its pre-Islamic past. Turkish language reformers tried to extend what they perceived as cultural and political differences with Arabic and Persian culture to the level of morphology and the lexicon. Rather than acknowledge Turkish as a historical bricollage, they problematized elements of the language that didn't conform to the normative expectations of a national language of the European model. European languages were seen as hegemonic, rational, and modern, and therefore as the ideal. Often Arabic terminology was shed under the pretense of linguistic purity to be immediately replaced by the same word adopted from French. These cultural differences were extended and applied to the level of linguistic difference. We should note that identifying with Western culture is just as much an example of Fractal recursivity as a rejection of Islamic culture. It is through a dialectic of recognition, and identifying a lack in their language in comparison with Western culture that the language reformers molded their language policy. It is difference and opposition which frame the project from both sides.
Gökalp begins his argument by remarking that the national language of Turkey will no doubt be that of its capital Istanbul. But this metropolitan language is divided between the written Ottoman and the spoken Turkish vernacular. This is seen as more than merely impractical for the needs of administration.
This double language that we see in Istanbul is a linguistic sickness. Every sickness has a treatment. In that case this sickness must be treated.[44]
This difference between the written and spoken language is seen as irreconcilable by referring to other European countries that have a uniform language. Trying to meld the two languages into one is impossible. Trying to make the written Ottoman into the state language would be as artificial as Esperanto. With the excessive amount of Arabic and Persian interventions, how could this Ottoman Esperanto ever be a spoken language? In that case, Gökalp argues that the only option for a national language would be to reform the spoken language of Istanbul.
Gökalp has many examples from the European experience in coming to the conclusion that he does; Parisian French had become the hegemonic language of France. By focusing on the opposition between what he perceives as homogenous European language and the Turkish diglossia, he sees Turkey's language situation as problematic. He sees the relationship between written Ottoman and spoken Turkish not as two registers on a continuum but as irreconcilable opposition. He states very clearly that no rapprochement is possible. In order to resemble European languages and to mimic their regimes of language, Gökalp advocates abandoning Ottoman Turkish and to focus on a reform and development of spoken Turkish.
If Ottoman Turkish was rejected as a possibility for a national language based on its lexical colonization by Arabic and Persian, the choice of spoken Turkish does not immediately appear to be a very logical solution. Gökalp admits that the spoken language as well contains large amounts of foreign vocabulary which has been naturalized[45]. These adopted words are often needless synonyms of such common words as bread (ekmek/nan/hubz) and water (su/ab/ma). How then, if these Arabic and Persian words have been seen as artificial and alien, can they be accounted for in the vernacular and further more, what attitude should be taken towards them? Aydingun identifies three approaches which were represented by different language reform groups: Language purists (Tasfiyeciler), conservatives (muhafazakarlar), and the Young Pens of which Gökalp was a member.[46] The language purists called for a complete rejection of any and all foreign words and to fill in gaps with words from other languages in the Turkic language family, such as Tatar or Uzbek. The Conservatives were against any tampering with the language. The opinion of the Young Pens, which is outlined in detail in 'Principles of Turkism', is to develop a middle-path based on a rubric for determining whether foreign words should be naturalized or stripped.
This rubric also involves a process of Fractal Recursivity. The mere fact that these words are somehow seen as different is an ideological framing of what is and isn't a real Turkish word. The problematization of specifically the Turkish lexicon is an extension of differences between registers within Turkish and between categories of 'indigenous' and 'foreign'. The actual language situation of spoken Turkish at the time involved a mix of indigenous and adopted words, semantic overlap, and a lack of certain technical and modern nomenclature. However, in order to forge a new national language suitable to the needs of the modern state, reformers needed to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable use of the language. The necessity of this division is clearly ideological and bound with ruling class interests as even Gökalp admits that the 'people' use most foreign expressions without scruple. Etymology is the work of scientists[47].
Ironically, the main judge chosen by Gökalp as the arbitrator of which words to retain in the new national language is the 'people' themselves.
According to the people, in our homeland the words freedom (istiklal) and sovereignty (hükümranlık) are now part of the Turkish language...according to the academics, on the other hand, these words are still part of Arabic and Farsi... It is evident that the first take of language policy according to Turkism, is to reject the purist academics point of view and instead to accept the unconscious point of view of the people.[48]
According to Turkists, any word known or used by the Turkish people is a national word.[49]
Admittedly, Gökalp's use of differentiation is conflicted. He first seesthe intrusion of Arabic and Persian words in the written language as irreconcilable and then offers a compromise to retain them in the spoken language. He does offer a more reasoned approach to dealing with these foreign elements than the linguistic purists[50] but claims that it is based in the myth of the people's unconscious ability to discern what is right. The rules, however, were the pure invention of members of the Young Pens. He offers the following rules in regard to foreign words:
1) if a word can be derived using indigenous morphology than a derived form from Arabic should be rejected. For example, mektub is the Arabic passive participle (written) and can be equally expressed with the Turkish yazılmış and so should be stripped. This does not include words whose meaning shares no connection with the root in Arabic- Kitab (book) shares no relation to the verbal root k-t-b (to write) and holds the unique meaning of livre and so can be retained.
2) Suffixes adopted from Arabic and Persian (-kar, -i) should be dropped unless used in very common expressions.
3) Compounds such as the possessive construction (izafi terkip) and adjective markers (tavsifi terkib) adopted from Arabic and Persian should no longer be used. For example, the expression “a matter of life” should no longer be written using the Persian structure “hayati mesele” but rather the appropriately Turkish “hayat meselesi”.
Gökalp admits numerous exceptions with each one of these rules, and preferring “hayal meselesi” over its almost identical Persian rendering seems comically arbitrary. The purpose however is to defend a rational and allegedly impartial criteria for sorting through the vast input of foreign words and expressions.
The other main task outlined in the chapter is deciding on how to enrich and modernize the vocabulary of Turkish. Gökalp claims that creating a new Turkish is not just a negative process.
Old Ottoman's sickness was not just an excess...if it had been so that by tossing out those elements our language could have easily been treated. Its second sickness was was a lack of many words. That until the appearance of the Turkism movement, no meaningful or clear article in philosophy could be written and no work of literature could be clearly or correctly translated is a testament to this lack.[51]
Gökalp puts missing words into two categories. The first is works that already exist in spoken Turkish throughout Anatolia but have not entered the written language. He mentions that every city has a branch of the Türk Ocakları which will work to gather these words and expressions.[52] Words and expressions will also be taken from folk literature and other dialects of Turkish. The second kind of missing words are international. In order to express “scientific concepts, philosophical viewpoints, literary images, and poetic feelings” taken from European civilization, new words are needed. As Turkey sought to align itself with European civilization, there was a great need to translate these words into Turkish. But how could they be translated into Turkish if they didn't have a counterpart to begin with? He guesses that many words can be mined in the everyday language of the people. Words taken from animals, plants, even feelings, can be adapted to the purpose. If this doesn't work they can be derived using principles of Turkish morphology.
This process of creating neologisms from indigenous Turkish morphemes was actually carried out to a great extent in Republican Turkey and the results were mixed. Some words have become completely accepted while other proved too artificial to be adopted. Some words proved that a major underlying purpose of the coining of neologisms was to replace Arabic and Persian words with their European equivalents.
As the pure Turkish replacement for the Arabic hayal - image they produced imge its alleged origin being the Old Turkic im - password with the addition of the suffix seen in çekirge - grasshopper and süpurge - broom. The connection between password and image may seem tenuous but one only has to spell out imge and the French or English image to see the true etymology.[53]
Gökalp accepts that culturally specific terms from European languages (feodolizm, bolşeviklik) don't need to be changed and can be adopted wholesale. This goes the same for technologies and other inventions that have become popular internationally. Finally, Gökalp recommends a French to Turkish dictionary to make official these adoptions and to make sure there is no overlap. To sum up, he describes the process of register stripping as “cleaning” (temizleme), the search for replacements with native words as “cultural advancement” (harslaştırma), and the adoption of European words as “refinement” (tehzib).
It should be obvious by now the clear pejorative sense given to “cleaning” as referring to the stripping of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. From a purely functional perspective, what can be claimed as the justification for dropping, for example, the Arabic word for term (ıstılah) and to replace it with the French word for term (terim) other than a desire to amplify the difference between Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages? Fractal recursivity is the process by which the language reformers in Turkey were able to envision linguistic difference between theirs and other languages and to act on those ideological perceptions to enact actual reform. Not only seen as a dichotomy between West and East, Gökalp and other reformers played up the cultural animosity between an aristocratic and exclusivist Ottoman heritage on one hand, and a populist, indigenous society on the other.
Erasure in “Kürt Aşiretleri”
Despite being an unfinished work, “A Sociological Study of Kurdish Tribes” offers clear evidence of the way in which ethnic and language politics were formed under the pretense of sociological conclusions. In speaking with Rıza Nur about the preparation of his study of Kurdish groups, Ziya Gökalp made it quite clear that he hoped to offer recommendations that would shape actions to be taken in the East of the new Republic to ensure Turkish national and linguistic sovereignty.
After the nation was able to put aside the myriad difficulties of the war, a movement was needed to develop society... At the head of these reforms is the need for a sociological and historical study of tribes. For geographical and economic reasons those Turkish tribes whose own languages and national character is being changed by nature of their being in areas of non-Turkish speaking majorities should be identified.[54]
We can expect here to see the process of erasure being employed in making clear-cut distinctions between what in reality was a complex sociolinguistic field. In his work, we see an attempt to present the Kurds as linguistically disunified, culturally alien, and socioeconomically primitive with the implication that they do not constitute a national culture equal to the Turks. This is an attempt to erase the notion that the Kurds have a national identity on par with that of the Turks and that their claims to self-determination be deemed illegitimate on sociolinguistic grounds. The other implicit conclusion is that Turks can and should be considered as wholly separate.
My purpose, after having collected and learned from scientific and economic information, is to organize a plan to explain to the Kurds that they are in fact Turks. Today, we know very well that those men who call themselves Kurds are for the most part Turkish. But in order to inform them of the fact, we have to teach them. The situation of the Turk is unfortunate. In Egypt and Algeria we have lost hundreds of thousands of Turks to Arabification. However, Kurdistan is still in our control and we are losing Turks in our homeland to Kurdification.[55]
He begins his exposition by trying to show how in Anthropology there is a clear taxonomy for differentiating between such social groups as clans, tribes, and nations. He gives a table with different levels of social organization with their Turkish, Arab, and French names. He is quick to point out that although Turks may be made up of different tribes and societies, they are united at a higher level in the form of a “nation”. This Turkish nation is, for Gökalp, of the same rank as the Islamic Ummah or The European international community. On the other hand, the Kurds will be described at a far smaller scale on this social hierarchy: the tribe (aşiret). It is only at this level of the social tree that a variety of groups that can be labeled as Kurdish are described as there is allegedly no higher branch to unite them. Even at this level the concept of unity is challenged. He argues that Kurdish is a misnomer as the four different groups that are said to speak Kurdish in fact have languages that are not mutually intelligible.
We have in our hands four independent languages: Kurmanji, Zaza, Soran, and Lur. The speakers of these four languages cannot understand each other. In terms of grammar, conjugation, and vocabulary, there are very large differences between them. And these differences are not those that separate dialects, they are differences that separate languages. Every one of these four languages can be considered to be an independent language from a linguistic point of view. And each one of these contains their own share of numerous dialects[56]
We see here a double standard when it comes to language classification in the work of Ziya Gökalp. Linguistic differences between dialects of Anatolian Turkish are seen as giving lexical strength to be added to the national language. Other Turkic languages are connected to Turkish by the concept of the Turkish “nation” and have deep semantic and historical links. Diversity between Kurdish tribes, however, is proof that they are not in fact a single group at all. When it comes to self-identification, Gökalp claims that among the Kurds themselves they often refer to these four languages as being synonymous with their ethnicity rather than with Kurdish.
“'Is that man Kurdish or Zaza?' and by Kurd Kurmanji is implied.[57]”
This identification at the tribal level is meant to be further proof that there is in fact no language community that can be called Kurdish.
Later on in the work, Gökalp uses iconicity to show how Kurds show their aversion to social cohesion and how their loyalty does not surpass the tribal level. In a section entitled “tribal mentality”, he explains that while Kurdish people evade military service, don't understand the meaning of a homeland (vatan), and lack a sense of nationhood (kavmi mefkuresiz), they do have a strong sense of loyalty to their tribes. This loyalty is a constant cause for conflict among Kurdish tribes. His argument is an example of iconicity because in order to support his sociological claim he offers nothing other than Kurdish aphorisms. He takes a few proverbs to speak for the entire mindset of a social group. For example:
pısmam pırın bê şer nabe – I have many cousins, it is impossible to avoid a fight
Eşîra mın qayıl nabe – my tribe will never be placated
This sense of tribal loyalty is indeed, as Gökalp points out, stronger than love.
Mın dıl hebû, te dil hebû gündî mâlî qayıl nebû
I'm in love with you, you're in love with me, but our village and families won't let it be.
Erasure here works by a process of presenting certain arguments on the incoherence of the Kurdish language community that while it may not be empirically false, are oversimplifications of a complex linguistic situation. The Kurds' sense of loyalty is to be seen as alien from Turkish national values. The bias in the presentation of linguistic facts poses a contrast to Gökalp's other works which centered the Turkish language in a prehistoric heritage, praised its adaptability and logical coherence, and set it on a track for national unification. If compared with such ideological patronage, Kurdish is made to seem insignificant. Even its existence is questioned.
Gökalp's work did indeed contribute to a concrete process of the erasure of Kurdish culture and language during a great part of the Republican period and remained an incredibly contentious issue up to the present. At their expense came an ideological representation of a united and contiguous Turkish language community. The Kurdish language has been banned in schools, media, and in administration with varying levels of dogmatic extremism during the whole history of the Turkish Republic. This ideological process of erasure rose to such levels of farce that during the 1930's and 1940's the Government didn't recognize Kurdish identity at all, and officially referred to Kurdish groups as “mountain Turks”.
Conclusion
The work of Ziya Gökalp is an invaluable document in studying a pivotal historical moment in the transformation of ideological subjectivity in Turkey. In his work we can trace how the three processes of iconicity, fractal recusivity, and erasure worked to change perceptions of the sociolinguistic field and thereby to sever Turkey from its Ottoman heritage and to set it upon a foundation of national consciousness. It was an ontological shift from Islamic conceptions of sovereignty and privileged access to truth to one centered on the state, citizenship, and ethnic identity[58]. This was not merely a rhetorical exercise. By proposing an imagined sociolinguistic community, Gökalp had a direct influence on actual state institutions. With his work we have a more complete explanation for the language regime that eventually came to be in the Republican period.
Language reform was a central element in the establishing of ideological hegemony because of the importance of an effective language regime in garnering legitimacy for a government. Pool claims that there are linguistic prerequisites for a ruling class to achieve political goals.
[proponents of national political regimes] believe that a national political regime is impossible without the existence of a nation (what I above called a “supremely legitimate and territorially dominant community”) and that a nation, in turn, is impossible without a language that the members of the community are (virtually) all competent in and use (virtually) exclusively in communication with one another.[59]
After the question of legitimacy, the reform of Turkish was important for the actual exercise of power by these regimes. All state institutions, from the judiciary to the military, require language in almost all aspects of their operations. What's more, in order to interpellate an individual as a juridical or civil subject in the first place, the language in which this address is made must be recognized and comprehensible. For this reason, the imagining of a national language is a central element in what Michel Foucault describes as the production of subjects of power. We have seen how Gökalp used iconicity to posit an inseparable semiotic link between the Turkish language and Turkish citizens using a nationalist myth based on etymological evidence. He sought to produce a linguistic subject that could subsequently be subjected to the power of a language regime.
Creating a subject of power, like the nationalist subject in the work of Gökalp, requires not only the imagining of new identities and the resurrection of old mythologies. It also requires the destruction and suppression of conflicting identities. Joseph Massad claims that this production of subjects at the same time involves a process of repression. Though his work focuses on the juridical aspects of ideological interpellation, we can easily see how his claims can be extended to language ideology.
To produce the new, the old has to be repressed. The very production of a normalized subject requires the production of its other, the “abnormal,” whose abnormality has to be repressed and buried to reveal the normal as essence.[60]
As we have seen, Gökalp did not merely create an essentialist narrative or advocate inclusion and creation to produce the modern Turkish language. Equally important in his project was the repression and rejection of an imagined linguistic other. In the case of Turkish it was Arabo-Persian/Islamic language and aristocratic Ottoman culture. Fractal recursivity was the process by which he identified and repressed this other to clear the way for a new national subject.
The process of Erasure further shows how processes of production and repression work simultaneously as techniques of control in a language ideology. It was productive in the sense that it tried to produce an image of the integrity and hegemony of the Turkish language and consequently the national subject. It was repressive because this image was painted directly over the actual language situation and all of its actual members that did not in fact speak the hegemonic language.
[1] Paksoy, H.B..“Nationality and Religion: Three observations from Omer Seyfettin” Central Asian Survey Volume 3, No. 3 (1984): 109-115
[2] Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 2001.
[3] Seyfettin, Omer “ Ilk Dusen Ak” Istanbul, 1962. Pp. 67-68.
[4] Karpat, Kemal H. “The Memoirs of N. Batzaria: The Young Turks and Nationalism” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul., 1975), p. 293
[5] Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised and extended. ed.). London: Verso, 1991. This theory on the effects of print-capitalism also helps to explain why religious claims to sovereignty and ontological truth, ie. Those used by the Ottoman State, were undermined by new cultural conceptions
[6] Irvine and Gal offer a criticism of Anderson by saying: “Anderson naturalizes the process of linguistic standardization, as if linguistic homogeneity were a real-world precondition rather than a construction concurrent with, or consequent to, print-capitalism) (Irvine and Gal pg. 76) The use of media by the Young Turks was not only meant to reach a homogeneous Turkish speaking population, but to be one part in a political process of creating such a population.
Perry, John R. “Language Reform in Turkey and Iran” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Aug., 1985), pp. 296
[8] Pool, Jonathan “Language Regimes and Political Regimes” Language Policy and Political Development
Brian Weinstein, editor Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1990, p. 241–261
[9] Ibid 243.
[11] Çolak, Y. “Language Policy and Official Ideology in Early Republican Turkey” Middle Eastern Studies, 40 (6), 67 – 91.
[12] Balçık, Mehmet Berk. Formations and Transformations of Language Regimes: Turkey, a Case Study.Istanbul: Sabanci University, 2009.
Woolard, Kathryn A., and Bambi B. Schieffelin “Language Ideology “ Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 23 (1994), p.58
[14] Althusser mentions that besides technical know-how, proper behavior, and respect for the established order, children must learn “to speak proper French”. Holding an idealized view of an official language and accepting the ideological assumptions about is just as much a part of interpellation as other elements of the Ideological State Apparatus.
[15] Aydingün, Ayşegül and İsmail Aydingün. “The role of Language in the Formation of Turkish National Identitiy and Turkishness”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 10: 34 pg. 17
[16] Just as an anecdote, on the Turkish census in 1927, there were still 14 languages registered as spoken in Turkey (Balçık 159). Despite this, the Turkish constitution of 1924 unequivocally states “The official language of the State of Turkey is Turkish.”
[17] Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” Regimes of Language Oxford 2000. pg. 36
[18] Ibid p. 37
[19] Ibid 38
[20] Ibid 71
[21] Wilce, Jim “Diglossia, Religion, and Ideology: On the Mystification of Cross-Cutting Aspects of Bengali Language Variation”. Proceedings of the 1995 Bengal Studies Conference, University of Chicago. Electronic document.
[22] Irvine Gal 38-9
[23] Ibid 36
[24] Aydingun 417
[25] Parla, Taha The social and political thought of Ziya Gökalp : 1876 - 1924. Leiden, 1985 pg. 12
[26] Parla 34
[27] Kieser, Hans-Lukas Turkey Beyond Nationalism : Towards Post-Nationalist Identities I. B. Tauris : New York, 2006 p. 106
[28] Parla 25
[29] Çotuksöken, Yusuf. “Türk Töresi: introduction” Ziya Gökalp Kitaplar YKY: Istanbul, 2007. pg 93 ( All citations of Gökalp are my own translation from the Turkish)
[30] Karpat, Kemal H. Studies on Turkish Politics and Society : Selected Articles and Essays. Brill Academic Publishers ,2003 p. 3
[31] Gökalp, Ziya “Turk Töresi” Ziya Gökalp Kitaplar YKY: Istanbul, 2007. p. 102
[32] Parla pg. 60
[33] Ibid 61
[34] Gökalp, pg. 95
[35] Ibid p. 96
[36] Ibid pg. 101-2
[37] Scharlipp, Wolfgang-Ekkehard. “ Die alttürkische Religion und ihre Darstellung bei einigen türkischen Historikern”Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Bd. 31, Nr. 2 (1991), pp. 178
[38] Gökalp p.109
[39] Ibid. 110
[40] Ibid 111
[41] Irvine and Gal 38
[42] Gökalp 120
[43] Koç, Mustafa pg. 169
[44] Gökalp, Ziya “Türkçülüğün esasları” Ziya Gökalp Kitaplar YKY: Istanbul, 2007 237
[45] Gökalp 239
[46] Aydingun 419
[47] Gökalp 244
[48] Ibid 242
[49] ibid 244
[50] Aydingun
[51] Gökalp 250
[52] In fact, Türk Ocakları was an enormously influential organization that, contrary to Gökalp's allusion to them as passive ethnographic cataloguers, played a repressive role in enforcing the new state language from above. As Balçık states “Türk Ocakları and Halkevleri were the organizations, which were active at the civil level, but they were encouraged and controlled by the government. Theirs was a missionary work, to deliver the revolution down to the people. At times, they became more enthusiastic about the rate of Turkification of the non-Turkish elements of the society. There were demands from the civil society to legalize the speaking of Turkish in public spaces as mandatory.” ( Balçık 97)
[53] The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. 2010. 01 November http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/jarring.htm
[54] Gökalp, Ziya “Kürt Aşirerleri hakkında soslojik tektikler” Ziya Gökalp Kitaplar YKY: Istanbul, 2007 559
[55] Ibid 559
[56] Ibid571
[57] Ibid 572
[58] Anderson 52
[59] Pool 242-3
[60] Massad, Joseph A. Colonial Effects: the Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. pg. 4
Comments