Turkey’s president wants to purge Western words from its language

TURKEY’S president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responded to last summer’s attempted coup by sacking or suspending 160,000 public servants and arresting 60,000 more. But his latest purge has a more abstract target. Mr Erdogan wants to rid Turkish of unsightly Western loan-words. Turkey faces a mortal threat from foreign “affectations”, Mr Erdogan declared on May 23rd. “Where do attacks against cultures and civilisations begin? With language.”

Mr Erdogan started by ordering the word “arena”, which reminded him of ancient Roman depravity, removed from sports venues across the country. Turkey’s biggest teams complied overnight. Vodafone Arena, home of the Besiktas football club, woke up as “Vodafone Stadyumu”. Critics wondered what the Turkish language had gained by replacing one foreign-derived word with another.

Like other languages, Turkish has struggled to check the advance of Western words. Some, like sovmen (showman) and atasman (attachment), make purists cringe. But others are esssential. The first big wave of Western nouns arrived in the 19th century, accompanied by European goods, fashions and military advisers. Words borrowed from French account for roughly 5% of the Turkish vocabulary. A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a haircut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to beat the afternoon trafik and finish the day relaxing in a sezlong on her hotel teras.

The mother of all Turkish vocabulary purges was the language revolution of the 1930s decreed by the founder of the republic, Kemal Ataturk. As part of his bid to reorient Turkey away from the Middle East, Ataturk dumped the Perso-Arabic alphabet for a Romanised one and banished thousands of words with Arabic or Persian roots. Officials at the newly created Turkish Language Institute (TDK) looked for replacements in Turkic languages. Where none could be found, they invented new ones or created fanciful etymologies tracing borrowed words to supposed Turkish origins.

Because so much abstract vocabulary had come from Arabic and Persian, this in effect created a new language. From one generation to the next, the country’s cultural history was cut off. Mr Erdogan seems to want to turn the clock back, complete with imperial nostalgia and resentment towards the West. In 2014 he proposed introducing mandatory high-school classes in Ottoman Turkish, which survives today only among linguists, historians and clerics. The plan was shelved after a popular backlash.

The offensive against Western loanwords will probably meet a similar fate. In an interview, the TDK’s head, Mustafa Kacalin, clarified that it would apply only to “bizarre” foreign words incomprehensible to most Turks. The limits became clear in Mr Erdogan’s own speech on May 23rd, in which he denounced loanwords by using a loanword. They were not, he said, “sik” (“chic”). Many Turks no doubt consider the whole thing a load of bosh—from the Turkish bos, “nonsense”.