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Tuesday, July 4, 2017 | by Burak Bekdil

Originally published under the title “Erdoğan’s “Language Revolution” Epitomizes His Anti-Western and Cultural Islamism” @ BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 518.

The Turkish alphabet (Image by Charles Kremenak via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s in a name? A good deal. You would risk offending a Turk if you called his country’s biggest city “Constantinople” instead of “Istanbul.” Your Turkish friend would probably not know that the word “Istanbul” morphed from “Eis tin Polin,” which means “to the city” — in Greek.

Consider my own case. I was born in Ancyra, with a grandfather from Georgia, who settled first in Rhizios; my mother was a proud Chalcedonian; my parents were laid to rest in Aivali. My childhood was spent in Smyrna and my military training in Amaseia; I was a conscript in Cevlik via El-Azez. Or consider President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is from Potamia. His predecessor, another Islamist, is from Caesarea. His three predecessors, chronologically, came from Akroenos, Sparta, and Maldiye. The Turks owe their independence largely to a successful war at Gallipoli. Another great day in the history of the Turkish Republic was Ataturk’s landing at Sampsus, where he launched the War of Independence. And the first capital of the Ottomans was Prousa.

Not one of those town names is Turkish. Even the contemporary word for the Turkish homeland, “Anadolu,” comes from the Greek word “Anatoli” (“east”).

Nevertheless, in deeply polarized Turkey, language is not just language. It has been part of Erdoğan’s campaign to make Turkey more Islamic and more Turkish. Remarkably, in 2014, Erdoğan lectured on a language he does not understand, speak, read, or write. “We once had a language [Ottoman] perfectly suitable for science,” he lamented. “Then it disappeared overnight [Ataturk’s alphabet revolution].” In 1923, only 2.5% of the Turks were literate, and only a fraction of them could speak Ottoman.

In many ways, Erdoğan’s passionate longing for a dead language is both ideological and Orwellian: “The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect” (George Orwell, 1984)…

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