The republic and the nation of Turkey began on two different dates. The republic, born of military might and presidential power, commenced its troubled existence with the actions of one man, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (as implied, the first president of the Republic of Turkey). The nation, born of false histories and feeble myths, came to life in fits and starts over the course of more than a decade; in fact, the nation is still beginning. Benedict Anderson, the renowned political scientist, defines any nation as an “imagined community” in that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” Anderson’s framework for the success of nations like Turkey, however, accounted only for an ideological history and a practical future, not for a convenient present. Atatürk hoped to build a new Turkey from the ground up, joined together in comradeship by his own willpower, and he would start with the language. “Despised by the educated as a barbarous and uncouth jargon,” as the historian Uriel Heyd phrased it, the Turkish language of the Ottomans would require, in Atatürk’s view, significant change before it could ever truly be viewed as civilized. As part of a sweeping set of so-called Kemalist reforms designed to build a new Turkish national identity set apart from the history of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk proposed a series of changes to the Turkish language that irrevocably altered its existence, beginning with the romanization of its script and extending through the erasure of practically all Arab and Persian influence. These changes, however, were fickle in nature, often contradicting the ideals that he had so strongly propounded and never quite reaching the whole Turkish population. The Kemalist quest for linguistic reform as a form of Westernization failed in its key objective: its Western ideological influences resulted in a structurally Western language that continued to lack Western content, therefore marginalizing and isolating Turkey in its quest for belonging. These failures took place on two distinct planes, in both the partially Westernized ideological underpinnings of the Turkish state and the practical consequences of isolating a country so defined by the existence of an unattainable elite class, and resulted in a paradoxical, hypocritical view of Turkish ideology that came to define the nation.
In his rise to power, Atatürk displayed a unique brand of political idealism: the historical concept of the nation, rather than a pragmatic view of its reality, took priority over all else, almost like a form of religion. He trafficked in rhetoric of convoluted, oracular histories that twisted and turned upon themselves until they reached his desired end point: his new history of the ancient Turks framed them as the ancestors of the Chinese, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Mesopotamian peoples, among others. In fact, he appeared to even believe these myths; he dedicated himself to diligent research that superseded the responsibilities and commitments required even of governance, and every one of his conclusions was thoroughly backed up by seemingly credible evidence that crumbled under examination. No other leader might have been able to achieve such a thing without compromising his legacy, but Atatürk defined a people in a remarkable feat of pseudoscholarship that proved attractive enough to draw the admiration and engagement of Turks throughout the new nation. For Atatürk, the development of Turkey as an idea, rather than as a state, took first priority. His Nutuk (translated literally, “The Speech”), thirty-six hours of focused lecturing delivered over the course of six days in 1927, recast the entire history of the Ottomans and Turks through a thematic approach that detailed the prehistoric roots of Turkish identity. In the speech, he described the ideals of secularism, democracy, and sovereignty as the nation’s most “precious treasures.” These concepts, central to the majority of post-revolutionary European societies, cemented Ataturk’s new Turkey’s ideological debt to the underpinnings of the Western world. The Nutuk, in the words of scholars Aysel Morin and Ronald Lee, posited a “teleological reading of history” through its militarization of the Turkish past. The “First Duty” that Atatürk had defined was to the courageous protection of Turkish independence at all costs, through whatever means necessary. This formed a striking contrast from the Islamic nations throughout the region, all of which would have defined their primary duty as adherence to the will and dictates of Allah. The historical approach Atatürk used to justify a hazy mythical mirage of Turkish power and philosophy allowed him to catapult himself to the top of a new national order and build a movement of his own; as the foundation of Kemalism, it provided the basis for the linguistic identity politics that would adorn Turkish ideology for decades to come.
The linguistic modernization of Turkey presents a clear example of the paradoxical nature of the nation’s change: in its quest to become more Western, Turkey displayed a profound anti-Western sentiment and sense of superiority that would handicap it throughout the decades to come. As with the Russian reforms centuries before, Turkish reform was unable to achieve total Westernization due to its ideological and pragmatic opposition to the requirements of a Western state. Atatürk was by no means the picture of democratic leadership. Although he may have presented himself as a man of the people, an enthusiastic proponent of his own theories teaching Turkish citizens and presidential advisors the ins and outs of his new language, his rule had its authoritarian tendencies in his single-minded commitment to improvement––a loaded term that in this case translated almost directly to the adoption of Western technologies and ideologies. Although Atatürk took on a relatively standard Allied foreign policy during the interwar period, aligning himself with France and Britain and demonstrating his commitment to a non-interventionist approach that mirrored his contemporaries’ outlooks on the world order, his domestic policy told a far more complicated story. In the course of his quest for linguistic purification, Atatürk stripped his people of their family names in a 1934 ordinance that replaced them with original Turkish alternatives, falsifying the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of a nation that actually possessed immense linguistic diversity. In addition, he created what was effectively a one-party state, establishing an opposition group purely for the sake of optics in 1930 and even then reportedly declaring there to be “no difference” between the two political organizations. His legitimization of his own rule through force rather than the will of his people contradicted nearly all of the values and democratic principles that the West held dear, and he in fact did not even originally intend for his new language to take on Western characteristics. Although Atatürk had long intended to implement a program of romanization, in Scott Ahearn’s words, “the quest for ‘pure’ Turkish words was arguably a search Eastward toward Central Asia and Mongolia.” Indeed, scholar Ilker Aytürk insists that initial Turkish reform was Western-defiant in nature. As a result of these ideological contradictions, the Westernization of Turkey occurred only in part, a failure that would eventually distance Atatürk’s Kemalist regime from both Europe and Asia.
The Sun-Language Theory, the basis for nearly all of Atatürk’s plans for a Turkish future, only furthered the hypocrisy of his view of the West. The actual linguistic reform of Turkey, which took place through three different processes of Westernization, was most insidious in the third: its commitment to a linguistic creation myth that outdid the Turkish History Thesis in its utter absurdity. One by one, Ataturk implemented romanization, the exchange of Persian and Arab verbiage for European loanwords, and the broad view of the Sun-Language Theory, which cast the Turkish language as the father of all others, resplendent in its history and power. Although it made the replacement of loanwords obsolete––after all, if all languages were originally Turkish, then no such thing as a “non-Turkish” word existed––it also nullified the Westernizing power of linguistic reform. Continuing to alter the language that he had already chosen to portray as prehistoric and all-encompassing projected only hypocrisy and distanced his ideology from the Western notions he was attempting to co-opt. In Aytürk’s words, the Sun-Language Theory relied on Western approval in order to appear “less nationalistic and more scientific”; therefore, elite Turks attempted to pin the origins of the theory on H.F. Kvergić, a Viennese linguist often credited with the intellectual roots of Turkish linguistic nationalism. However, Aytürk’s recent research has definitively proven that Kvergić does not bear responsibility for Turkish linguistic reform in any way, even as Atatürk attempted to cast himself as a non-factor in the development of the language. In fact, he was so averse to publicity regarding his theory that he requested that press coverage refer to him as the anonymous “Turkish Genius.” Kvergić served instead as an ideological stand-in for centuries of German and Austrian linguists who slowly shaped Atatürk’s reformist views, yet the idea of Turkish dominance and the paternalistic tone of the Sun-Language Theory railed against the very idea of Western superiority in a manner that would likely find little support among Europeans. In Turkish linguists’ insistence that their language was responsible for the most complex abstract thought, they walled themselves away from the possibility of existing on equal footing with Europe in favor of delusions of their own superiority. The roots of the Sun-Language Theory, diametrically opposed as they were to the myth of the West as the birthplace of culture, provoked the isolation of Turkey from the world it so desired to join.
In the process of linguistic reform, the Turkish republic betrayed a key tenet of Kemalism through its abandonment of secularism. Although the secularization of Turkish life had been a crucial part of initial attempts at linguistic reform, the (literal) gospel of Westernization overtook the long-held goal of a secular state, and with it any allegiance to Atatürk’s stated ideals. Atatürk had embarked on a quest to cleanse Turkish of its Muslim influences by abolishing the caliphate, removing Arabic influence from the language, and establishing a variety of anti-religious reformist policies. Justifying these edicts by the purported secularism of Western states, he insisted that his priorities would remain with the secular existence of Turkey, yet in attempting to popularize his linguistic reforms, he used religion as a rhetorical tool to enforce his own vision. One of the earliest permutations of the Sun-Language Theory was an insistence that Adam and Eve spoke Turkish in the Garden of Eden, first expressed by Enver Celaleddin, who utterly failed in popularizing such an idea. The use of religious and in fact even Christian (an uncommon minority religion in Turkey at the time) rhetoric to justify the Sun-Language Theory exemplifies its position of precedence above all the other stated ideals of Kemalist reformers, who would abandon the Six Arrows they so worshipped if it allowed them to assert their own historical power. Judaism and Islam, too, found their uses as weapons of the state; in particular, linguistic reform was a tool for Jewish assimilation into Turkey. The rural rabbi Moise Efendi implored his congregation to “speak the beloved language of the noble Turkish race and civilized proprietors of the great country in which we live” in 1933, and other rabbis similarly encouraged the Jewish population in Turkey to adopt the new language for the sake of their own inclusion. As a result, the government began to utilize the attempts of other religious groups to join in the new Turkey as propaganda for the inclusivity of its reformist endeavors, with Christian and Jewish minorities taking on especial prominence in the movement for linguistic reform; predominantly Jewish settlements even passed municipal ordinances mandating the use of Turkish. The role which religious rhetoric played in the spread of the new Turkish alphabet and language highlights the inherent hypocrisy of Kemalism and the extent to which linguistic reform often directly contradicted the ideology it was meant to accompany. Beyond the failed secularism of the linguistic reform movement, which aided in partially Westernizing a nation that remained inconsistent with its own ideals, the movement also continued to exclude much of Turkey from its reforms, making Turkish yet more inaccessible.
Initial justifications for Turkish language reform––thinly veiled attempts at hiding the true nature of this Westernization––relied on the feeble cause of ameliorating the elitist vocabulary of Ottoman Turkish, yet this purpose in no way stemmed from a truly anti-elite sentiment. The language’s Arab and Persian loanwords, borrowed in an attempt to intellectualize what had been a seemingly simplistic Turkic mother tongue (yet more proof of the total inadequacy of the Sun-Language Theory in verifying Turkish superiority), made nineteenth-century Turkish nigh incomprehensible to the lower classes. The historian Frank Tachau explains how “Arabic and Persian were ‘regarded as more elegant or refined’ than Turkish as a result of the dominance of Islamic culture in the Empire,” and the manufactured complexity of the Turkish language led to the disapproval and revolt of politicians such as Ziya Gökalp, who described nineteenth-century Turkish as akin to “Ottoman Esperanto” and insisted on simplifying and reforming it. The palpable contempt with which politicians amid the Young Turk movement (a late-Ottoman-era reformist party that later sprouted into the modern Republic of Turkey) viewed the language in which they were trapped suggests that they desired a more egalitarian, “common” version, yet their reforms almost immediately swapped these words for complex European loanwords. Despite their early attempts at building a new language based on Mongol influence, reformers soon realized that drawing influence from what was seen as one of the most barbaric and primitive civilizations in Eurasian history would likely add fuel to the fire of European linguists who claimed that the non-inflectional Turkish language was not sufficiently sophisticated for complex thought. Consequently, reformers never did simplify Turkish, nor was their goal ever to truly make it accessible to the working class; instead, these changes left broad swaths of the population unable to access their very own language, culture, and history.
The Westernization of Turkish resulted in little progress on this front; instead, the language required constant complex decoding and failed to improve the class divide in any meaningful way. The syntactical structure of new words was based on the inherent logic of the root-based construction of Romance languages, such as French, even as this logic did not exist within the Turkic languages themselves. In one address, various derivations and modifications of silâp, a loanword from French that unsurprisingly translates to “syllable” in Turkish, each took on a more complex version of a classical Western root structure of prefixes and suffixes, constructions that would have been entirely incomprehensible to someone without a nuanced understanding of Romance languages and their structures. As Margaret M. Wood, a visiting teacher and sociologist from the United States, wrote in 1929, this transition was the easiest for the highly educated, who likely already possessed reading comprehension abilities in either French, English, or German, but “for those who knew only Turkish… it [was] not so easy to have to learn to read and write all over again.” Schools, especially in more rural areas outside the reach of Atatürk’s aggressive enforcement of the new alphabet, continued to teach students the Ottoman script, even though this alphabet was essentially unusable outside these predominantly poor and uneducated regions; this failure to spread the new, romanized Turkish throughout the entire country only worsened the divide between elite and worker, urbanite and farmer. The Turkish people now also found themselves restricted in their ability to comprehend and engage with the historical texts that defined their culture. Disconnected from their history due to an unfamiliarity with Arabic and Persian vocabulary that prevented them from understanding the Ottoman script, they became yet more separated from a sense of belonging to any form of Turkish culture. By dehistoricizing the Turkish language and depriving the people of a connection to their past, Atatürk failed in his attempts at making Turkey anything but more divided and isolated, destroying the “immemorial past” which Anderson views as a stipulation for successful and constructive nationalism. As a result, despite the newly Westernized structure of the Turkish language, it lacked the ideological content necessary to ensure its viability. The structure, too, unsuited to the language’s daily function among the common people, only worsened the problem of a vast class divide and an incomprehensible language.
Through the partial Westernization of the Turkish language, Atatürk attempted to achieve lofty goals: a historical myth of a culture of founders and fathers that could still integrate into European society, a secular nation that could cast off the archaic legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and a country for whom a strong command of language was accessible to all. Through his tactics of modernization, however, he failed at nearly all of these goals. Instead, he exacerbated the isolation of Turkey and disconnected it from its history, even though he created a secular state that achieved short-term success. Today, Turkey is undergoing a period of rapid change. A new Ottomanism appears to be rising as the nation’s secular underpinnings crumble beneath it, and political authoritarianism has come to take over from what Atatürk had attempted to frame as a democracy. While this Ottomanism has been used to solve geopolitical conflict and may signal a brighter future for the Kurdish people, who have long been marginalized and oppressed, including through Turkish suppression of their language under Kemalist reforms, it also marks a major shift from the ideologies on which the Republic of Turkey was built. The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, appears to have turned to many of the same strategies as were in Atatürk’s playbook; he, too, is in the process of constructing a false Turkish history, yet this one wraps Central Asia into an expanding, imperial vision of Turkey’s future. Gone is the liminality of which Kemalist politicians once spoke, the notion of Turkey as a “bridge” or “gate” between the East and the West, yet Erdoğan has constructed another globalist vision of what Turkey could become, one where it reaches the level of power and dominance which the Ottoman Empire had once attained. Whether he finds success or failure in these endeavors remains unclear, as does the future of the ever-changing Turkish language.
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