Language ideology in Turkey

After writing my first paper on language ideology in the Turkish context, I realized how easy it would be to fall into the comfortable routine of continuing to set up the Kemalist state and nationalism as the boogie man for all subsequent research. But really any thing beyond a lazy perusal of the established literature on Language Ideology will show that all political actors and social groups exert an understanding of language. To give to state power the unique ability to determine conceptions of language is to participate in fetishizing its power. Besides this, from my brief time, and I mean brief, time within the World of Turkish academia, apparently small enough to require a national conference in order to fill a single boardroom, Kemalism proves time and time again to be the perfect punching bag for a generation of new scholars who grew up under the tutelage of those who have long since given up any of the genuine enthusiasm for the Foucaultian categories then nonetheless continue to employ.

In preparing to undertake an extensive account of the role of language ideology in Turkish literature for my PhD project, it is important to begin by setting my sights on more subtle and contested incidents of language used politically. For instance, the way that the right and left used two different lexicons in order to index themselves through their own rhetoric. This played out not only in the closed social networks and political pamphlets of the respective sides, but played a vital role in determining the default word choice to be used in mainstream society. The level of purification and deployment of neologisms can be seen to closely mirror the political climate of each respective era. This has been shown in the language of the various constitutions written following military coups by Yilmaz. 

A potential focus to take, if one is to look specifically at the effect on the novel, would be how authors sought to depict "the people's voice" as a political stance. You can trace an effort to represent the authentic regionalisms and dialects of the Anatolian countryside during the development and rise of the village novel: from the promotion of a awkwardly standard Istanbul dialect spoken by the peasants in "Kuyucakli Yusuf", to the almost complete dominance of dialogue itself in "Bereketli Topraklar Uzerinde" and erasure of the authority of the author. The use of iconicity and other methods of language ideology as explained by Irine and Gal are clearly seen in the construction of a language which depicts a rural subject possessing purity, authenticity, and folk wisdom.

The last track which could be taken, as far as I have thought about it casually in all of the moments before finally sitting down to write this, would be language as commodity. The way in which language takes on the dimensions of commodity fetishism, how promotion of slang and pop-culture language by advertising promotes the ever-increasing fragmentation and refreshing of speech. In short, the colonization of normal language by marketing. There is a great passage in Adorno's "on the Culture Industry" which speaks directly about how language is manipulated and fetishized in Late Capitalism, and I am sure that it could be made to work for an understanding of how Turkish continues to evolve in the new century. However, I am not sure if there is anything unique to the Turkish case that would make it an urgent topic of study.