Multilingual Society with Monolingual Policy: The Survival of Kurdish in Turkey

This paper aims to analyse the implications of the Turkish “one nation, one language” policy on the Kurdish in Turkey and assess the success of the Turkish government’s attempts at trying to change the linguistic behavior (Cooper, 1989) of the Kurdish community with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. From the break up of Ottoman Empire, Turkish Nation State established with the ‘one nation, one language’ policy to create a nation state based on one language (Turkish) and attempted (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: 4) to eliminate the use of other ethnic minority languages, particularly Kurdish, through a number of laws and regulations. Turkish Constitution of 1924 defined state language as Turkish. The constitution does not mention of other ethnic languages in Turkey and their rights (Spolsky, 2004, p. 60). The data of this study that elicited from Turkish government reports, censuses, state official documents, through libraries and archives in London and in Ankara indicate, soon after the establishment of Turkish republic in 1923, Turkish language policy occurred at the macro- level (state), and Kurdish has been banned in major cities and towns in North Kurdistan. The ban had major impact on Kurdish speech community who were enjoying linguistic freedom during the Ottoman’s rule. This paper will seek to explore how attempts made by Turkish State to achieve monolingualism, why particularly Kurdish targeted and will offer analysis of the impact (Besikci, 2017) on the use of Kurdish in Turkey. Keywords: Language policy, Turkish Language, Nation State, Monolingualism, Kurdish language.