Speaking Like The State: Political Economy of Language Planning in Turkey

Abstract

Between 1932 and 1938, the Turkish government undertook a campaign of linguistic purification, known as the Turkish Language Revolution, which drastically changed the etymological composition of the Turkish language. In this paper, I construct a novel text database of 340 million words covering 90 years to quantify the change in preference from Perso-Arabic to Turkic vocabulary. My dataset indicates that the share of Turkic vocabulary increased by more than 20 percent at the expense of Perso-Arabic vocabulary in the first 50 years after the Revolution, but I also document a statistically significant increase in the usage of Perso-Arabic vocabulary in recent years at the expense of Anglo-French vocabulary, a reversal of the goals of the Language Revolution. My analysis, using event studies, disentangling word-level heterogeneous treatment effects and analyzing diversity of words in the newspaper, shows that the Revolution succeeded not as an incidence of top-down centralized planning by the Kemalist establishment, but in so far as it responded to the demands of writers and intellectuals, suggesting that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.