The Turkish language reform

Abstract

The fact that Ottoman poetry today is so unintelligible to high school students that it has to be taught as foreign language texts also clearly shows that the process of replacing Arabic and Persian lexical and syntactical elements with Turkish ones has been successful. Atatürk’s aim was to liberate the Turkish language from foreign elements, or, rather, from Arabic and Persian elements, which represented the old culture from which he wanted to rescue the country and language, and to replace them with pure Turkish elements. Although the multifaceted vocabulary of today’s Turkish may be used to color the language politically or religiously on a lexical level, it also presents the conscious writer with immense possibilities of stylistic variation without any necessary political or religious implications. The fact that Ottoman Turkish is a different language that can only be read with the help of a dictionary, seems to be accepted.