Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey
in 1923 and the consolidation of the Kemalist regime
in 1926, the President of the new republic, Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk launched a reform process which aimed
at changing Turkey's laws, administration, culture
and, most significantly, its image. One facet of
this process of transformation was the language
reform that commenced with romanisation of the
Turkish script in late 1928 and reached its zenith
later on in the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1934, the
Türk Dil Kurumu – the Turkish
Language Institute, a radical reformist institution
founded by Atatürk in 1932 – banished thousands of
Arabic and Persian words from spoken and written
Turkish and fabricated new, ‘authentically’ Turkish,
words to replace them. The radical-reformist zeal
subsided in 1935 as a result of the linguistic chaos
of the previous years and came to a halt in 1936
with the proclamation of the so-called Sun-Language
Theory. However, so much had changed during those
few years and has done since, that even secondary
school and university graduates in contemporary
Turkey are not able to read and understand, for
instance, Atatürk's famous Speech
of 1926 from its original, and hence feel the need
to consult ‘modernised’ or simplified versions. In
this respect, the legacy of the language reform in
early republican Turkey remains a matter of bitter
controversy and pits the reformist Kemalists against
an array of Islamists, conservatives and even
liberals. The current debate on what proper Turkish
is neatly overlaps with the major fault line that
still divides Turkish society.