loan words in Turkish

Fact: Turkish vocabulary is not as hard to pick up as I thought. Part of this is because although the Turkish language originated in Central Asia, it's been so influenced by the West that it's absorbed a lot of foreign words that I recognize easily when they pop up in Turkish.

This is something of a point of contention among my students, which I discovered when we brought up the issue of language in class to discuss how it relates to cultural and national identity and whether the government should protect language.

In context, the Turkish language already went through a major reform in the early 20th century, so much so that Ottoman Turkish is considered a separate language. Ataturk purged the language of foreign words, especially the Arabic words that had permeated Turkish as cultural, religious and political trickle effects of imperial cosmopolitanism. He threw out the use of Arabic script and replaced it with the Latin alphabet that Turkish uses today.

Turkey also has a national ministry of language designed to keep Turkish pure and protect language identity. However, according to my students, this isn't really working. I noticed this in particular when I was teaching sports vocabulary to my beginner students. Out of curiosity I asked how to say the same words in Turkish. The responses? "Basketbol, futbol, voleybol, sörf (surfing)..." Technological words are mostly derived from English too: radyo, televizyon. Even the verb "to program" is "programlamak." Other foreign words have a longer history of infiltration. For example, the only term I know in this country for "I hope" is "Insh'Allah," the Arabic phrase meaning "God willing." If there is a Turkish equivalent, no one uses it.

The discussion got more interesting as students also said that young people love to look cosmopolitan by replacing Turkish words with foreign words: saying "hello" instead of "selam," "waiter" for "garson," "sorry" for "pardon." I pointed out that all these "Turkish" words were themselves loan words from Arabic and French, which prompted the observation that a lot of the Turkish words are just too long. Which makes sense: why say "Affedersiniz" when "pardon" is equally understandable? Why use the ministry's literally translated nomenclature of "sepet topu" when "basketbol" is both hipper and more universal?

In many cases, the loan words are from imported concepts that had no Turkish word to begin with. My students emphasized that if the government established a Turkish word for a new thing before it actually came to the country, people have tended to use the Turkish word, for instance "bilgisayar," which means computer. But if the public got their hands on something before the government could translate it, like TVs, then the foreign word prevails. And while the young people moan about losing their identity and wanting to preserve Turkish culture, they're the ones perpetuating the integration of foreign words.

Every language is undergoing this same phenomenon to some extent, thanks to globalization. English is a perfect example of a language that has grown and evolved into something today that Thomas Jefferson and his friends probably wouldn't understand if they heard it. Chinese is the same, simply substituting Mandarin characters so that "巧克力" (chyow kuh lee) is chocolate and "粉絲" (fun sz) are fans, as in those who love Justin Timberlake. Taiwan's taken that a step further, so that if you watch TV there you'll see words like "High" written in English amongst the Chinese subtitles, a word has been adopted as slang for "happy." (Try explaining to teenagers that you really shouldn't tell native English speakers that you have been high all day.) France has taken legal measures to stop the invasion of foreign words into their language, although I don't know enough about the situation to say how effective that's been.

Globalization- a good thing increasing mutual intelligibility among languages? Or a McWorld force catalyzing homogeneity and destruction of local cultures? We haven't finished this unit in our textbook yet, and since the last lesson ended in a shouting match among the students, I have a feeling they have more to say on this topic. I'm looking forward to it.