Atatürk's long shadow: standard Turkish speakers as younger, more successful, and more attractive than their Kurdish-accented regional counterparts

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a well documented example of language planning that links national unity with language practice and has resulted in systemic attempts to linguistically and culturally assimilate its Kurdish populations, the Turkish national context has adopted standard language ideologies since its founding. Previous research has highlighted efforts by Kurdish students and restaurant managers to project a Turkish monolingual identity in front of their Turkish peers and customers, respectively, to avoid the negative effects of perceived linguistic profiling. As a means of exploring the salience of these perceptions from Turkish perspectives, the current study used a matched guise test to compare Turkish university students’ language attitudes toward standard vs. Kurdish-accented regional guises. The standard Turkish guises were perceived as significantly younger, more attractive, and more successful than the Kurdish-accented regional guises across all intra-speaker comparisons. In addition to confirming the stigma of Kurdish-accented Turkish, these findings suggest the persistence of singular ideologies of linguistic authority. This orientation renders the multilingual, multidialectal repertoires of Istanbul’s Kurdish-Turkish bilingual migrants who adapt linguistically to suit diverse scales largely invisible within Turkish-dominant settings.