Europe and the Turkish Language Reform: The Role of European Ideas and Preconceptions in the Quest to Showcase a Turkic Language on the World Stage

Abstract

This thesis examines the European influence on the Turkish Language Reform, a movement peaking in the 1930s in which the new Republic of Turkey set out to purge its language of the many Arabic and Persian expressions that had been borrowed over the centuries of the Ottoman Empire. While the Reform is often seen in the larger context of the many Westward-looking reforms that the new nation embarked upon under President Atatürk, this thesis argues that Western influence on the Language Reform was more adversarial than encouraging. The principal basis for this was a century of prejudicial views that had developed in European linguistics, claiming that inflectional languages such as those found in Europe (though Arabic and Persian were also included) were inherently superior to agglutinative languages such as Turkish. Nineteenth-century Western linguists such as Friedrich and August Schlegel, August Schleicher, Matthias Castrén, and Max Müller were influential in this European idea, often called the Inflectional Superiority Thesis, and this thesis examines the effect of these European players on the Turkish quest to formalize its agglutinative tongue and establish it as a literary and state language on the world stage. This thesis proposes that the response to this prejudice from the Turkish language reformers often avoided criticism or denial of it. Instead, the reformers sought to change the classification of Turkish itself, deeming it to be either an Indo-European language, or—in a still bolder reconception of prevailing linguistic theory—the ancestor of all human language. Additionally, this thesis presents some of the tangible effects of this quest to establish commonality with European languages, as seen in the wealth of Turkish neologisms, still in use today, that were constructed to safeguard the seeds of a Western-friendly origin story for the Turkish language.