The Language of Politics, The Politics of Language: The Political Literature in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic

Abstract

This project analyzes the crucial role played by language politics in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Situating the rise of ethno-nationalist monolingualism within a longer history of multiple language reform movements, I argue that language was a central domain for articulating ideas of nation, modernity, and ethnic purity. Focusing on the Armenian, Greek, and Turkish communities, I show how standardization and vernacularization movements served to further the dissolution of a multiethnic, multi-confessional and multilingual society and how such ethnolinguistic imperatives fueled both symbolic and material forms of violence and exclusionary policies. I focus throughout on texts by people who were born as subjects either of the Ottoman Empire or the Turkish Republic. Through these figures, I explore the complexities of the rise of nationalist monolingualism: in their lives and in their texts, I suggest, these writers reveal the blurred boundaries between political, religious, and cultural affiliations that were both hallmarks of Ottoman multilingualism and a catalyst to its destruction. Following an introduction that outlines the key historical turning points in the late Ottoman Empire, I take up three case studies in which language politics and practices reveal nationalist aspirations shaped both with and against the specter of ethnic and linguistic uniformity. In Chapter One, I explore the internal conflicts in Greek politics and culture, before and after the Greek Revolution of 1821, and I analyze how the Greek language question was shaped by perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and the figure of the Turk. In Chapter Two, I examine the secularist underpinnings of the Turkish language reforms and the state-sanctioned translation project of the Qur’an: Mehmet Âkif (Ersoy) was tasked with the translation, but as a religiously devout person, Âkif feared that his translation would be utilized by the state in the service of its secularization project. Âkif’s simultaneous acceptance of vernacularization in his translation and his refusal to “Turkify” Islamic religious practice show the complex dynamics in Turkey of the 1920s and 30s. Turning to the Armenian community of the Turkish Republic in Chapter Three, I probe how two members of the Armenian community of Turkey, Hagop Martayan and Zaven Biberyan, operated within the framework of Turkish language reforms and Turkey’s broader policies targeting Turkey’s minorities. These two figures demonstrate different modes of belonging and mechanisms of resistance and integration in unexpected and contradictory ways. The envisioned contributions of this project are specific to the fields of Armenian, Greek, Turkish, and Ottoman studies, as well as to the discipline of Comparative Literature. This project shifts the focus to language and literature from the dominant economic, political, and military perspectives in scholarship about the emergence of modernity and nationalism from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Additionally, my account of the rise of monolingualism in the Ottoman Empire contributes to scholarship in multi- and monolingualism studies and to interdisciplinary research on language politics.