The Challenge of Turkish Proper Names in Foreign Language Learning

Abstract

The article aims to sort out semantic and cultural diversity in Turkish female and male names, which could be challenging for foreign learners of Turkish. This research was designed as a descriptive analysis into how foreign names could be semantically and culturally interfered by foreign language learners of Turkish. So as to make the classification, the most frequent 100 names of newborn Turkish citizens between 1950 and 2020 years were officially gathered from the Turkish Statistics Institute. The findings reveal that these names reflect a wide diversity ranging from functional words to their derivations since Turkish is an agglutinative language causing challenges for foreigners, and it deduces it is far beyond of their formations. It is assumed that these names raise critical language awareness on structural and deep cultural insights of target language.