PERFORMATİF BİR BAKIŞ AÇISINDAN ALMANYA’DAKİ TÜRKÇE KONUŞANLARIN DİL HAKLARINI ARAMA PRATİKLERİ

Abstract

Turkish speakers’ linguistic rights in Germany have been central to the debates about their ties to Turkish culture as well as their place in the German society. Scholars have contributed to our understanding of such debates by conceptualizing linguistic rights as human rights and as cultural rights. These conceptualizations reveal legal inequalities and aim at finding ways to overcome them. In this article, I build on this literature, shifting the focus from Turks’ linguistic rights to their rights claiming practices. For this, I introduce feminist political scientist Karen Zivi’s performative approach to rights into the discussion on Turkish speakers’ linguistic rights in Germany. This performative perspective provides an alternative to the widely used frameworks of integration, discrimination, human rights and cultural rights. This approach demonstrates that Turkish speakers in Germany negotiate their place in their society by claiming their linguistic rights. This article also shifts the focus in these discussions away from the German state and to Turkish speakers themselves and establishes Turkish speakers in Germany as political actors with agency and their rights claiming practices as attempts to reshape the way they are understood in the German society.