Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

32 Language Planning and Education
Arabo-Persian alphabet was formally replaced by a Latin alphabet, the so-called
‘Gazi alphabet’ (Lewis 1999: 35). Radical though this was, it was soon eclipsed by a
still more ambitious project: the wholesale purging of the large number of words of
Arabic or Persian origin that had over centuries infiltrated into written Ottoman
Turkish, 9 and their replacement with words of Turkish origin so as to forge a pure
Turkish (Özturkçe), free of the ‘yoke of foreign languages’ 10 and less distant from
popular speech.
The project was unleashed in its fullest vigour at the close of the first Kurultay
(Turkish Language Congress) in October 1932 with what can appropriately be
described as a language mobilisation. All over Turkey, teachers, doctors, civil
servants, tax collectors and administrators were sent out to collect words from
Anatolian dialects to replace those of Arabic origin. Scholars, meanwhile, scoured old
texts and dictionaries of Turkic languages in search of replacements for the offending
Arabic-Persian words. The results of these endeavours were published in 1934 in a
volume titled Tarama Dergisi. The following year – for the benefit of a wider public
– lists of replacement words proposed by the press were published under the title Cep
Kilavuzu (Pocket Guide from Ottoman to Turkish) (Lewis 1999: 55).
Inevitably, perhaps, in such a large undertaking, involving many persons with
little or no linguistic expertise, there were excesses. Thus, while some neologisms
were created on sound philological principles by, say, compounding existing Turkish
roots and affixes, others were little more than concoctions arbitrarily plucked from
the imagination (see Lewis 1999). And, in cases where no Turkish equivalent could
be found for an essential word, ingenious efforts were often made to fabricate a
Turkish etymology for them.
The details of this neologising, and of the purification work conducted by the
Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK) (Turkish Society for the Study of Language) after Atatürk’s
death, lie beyond the scope of this chapter however. All we can include here is a brief
mention of the overall outcome, which is that by the 1970s written Turkish had been
so utterly transformed that young Turks could barely comprehend texts from the
1920s or 1930s. And it is this, combined with the impoverishment of the lexicon and
of register variation resulting from the whittling away of Ottoman words, that leads
Lewis (1999) to refer to the reform as a ‘catastrophic success’. He admits (1999: 150),
though, that not all is lost: old words are re-emerging, there is greater willingness to
countenance useful borrowings and the object of puristic concerns is now not so
much Ottoman vocabulary but incursions from English.
For language planners, then, the Turkish language reform is a remarkable, and
somewhat unusual, example of successful corpus planning. But it also illustrates the
unforeseen and adverse consequences that can flow from such large-scale intervention.
2.2.4 The role of status planning
Unlike corpus language planning, whose domain is language itself (see above), status
planning – that is, intervention targeted at the societal functions of language –
usually involves simultaneous activity across several social domains: the workplace,