Questioning Diglossia of the Language of Turks of Bulgaria
Tuncer Can & Martin Stilyanov Todorov
Syracuse 2005
Questioning diglossia of the language of Turks of Bulgaria
In our paper we will first give some historical account of how Turkish language spoken by Turks of Bulgaria has changed and was forcefully subject to change during Communist Era of Bulgarian Republic. Then, we will go on by questioning if the present day Turkish education is a creates diglossia as the language teaching materials are created and sent by the Minsitry of Education of Turkish Republic. These materials are developed based on the standard variety, which is the Turkish spoken in Istanbul. However, the Turks of Bulgaria are speaking some Balkan dialects which are also influenced by Bulgarian language due to some political and social changes in Bulgarian Republic.
Turkish is a Turkic language that belongs to the Ural-Altaic linguistic family. Other languages of this group are Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Gagaus, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Chuvash and Mongol languages. Each of these languages is spoken by more than one million people. Modern Turkish is not a homogeneous language. It is a compilation of the Istanbul, Ankara, Karaman, East-Anatolian, Konian and Balkan dialects. Today, Istanbul Turkish has the status of standard variety. Turkish language got many borrowings from Arabic and Persian during Ottoman period due to religious and political reasons. The Ottoman creole was written with the Arabic alphabet. Modern Turkish evolved from the Ottoman Turkish through a long nationalistic effort to purify it from the Arab and Persian vocabulary. Ibrahim Shinasi (1826-1871) was the first to propose the Latin script to replace the Arab script. During the Young Turks period some writers also wrote in a language much closer to today’s Turkish.
After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk started a number of secular reforms. One of them was regarding purifying the language. The Law on the Reform of the Turkish Language, adopted in 1928, replaced the Arab with the Latin script. In practice, the new script became compulsory for all Turks only in 1930. The new alphabet, containing 29 letters, was based on the phonetic principle, i.e. the words are written the way they are pronounced. The Arabic and Persian vocabulary was replaced by words based on archaic texts or created by some Turkish roots and affixes.
Turkish is consistently an agglutinative language, which makes it sometimes a favorite of linguists as the brightest example of agglutination. In the 19th century, prominent German linguists thought agglutination to be a sign of inferiority of the Turkic languages to the highly inflectional Indo-European ones, and this was also taken to mean that their speakers were inferior to the speakers of Indo-European languages. Curiously enough, the same view was revived in Bulgaria in the 1970-1980s. Turkish was considered an Asiatic tongue, which resisted the modernization carried out in Bulgarian as an Indo-European language (Poulton, 1993:126-127).
Turkish identity in Bulgaria is a combination of linguistic, religious, cultural and historical factors. Bulgarian state has given importance to one of these factors in different periods. For instance, while in the beginning of the Bulgarian state the religious factor had been favoured and given much freedom, it later would be replaced by linguistic factor as schools and newspaper in Turkish language had been supported, and even later the linguage has been banned completely.
After the establishment of the new secular Turkish Republic, the situation of Turks in Bulgaria changed and the ideology of the Turkish identity underwent an upheaval. Around the end of the 1920s, the first secular Turkish organization “Turan” was set up. Officially, it was promoted as a youth sport and cultural organization but it was clearly under Kemalist influence. It fought against assimilation by the Bulgarians and for the transformation of the Turkish population into a “national Turkish minority” (Hoepken, 1997:61). Turkish newspapers, published Bulgaria in Turkish language, like “Deliorman” and “Turan” supported the new Kemalist views and principles and propagated against the Islamic concepts. There were some other newspapers like “Medeniyet” who were supporting the religious vews against Kemalism. They were supported by Bulgarian state against the Kemalist supporters.
In attempt to replace the arabic alphabet, representing the religious side, with the Latin alphabet, representing the Kemalist side, failed in 1920s. However, eventually in 1938 it was changed after a lot of diplomatic activities between Turkish Republic and Bulgarian state. After 1940s the number of Turkish newspapers and schools decreased. (Hoepken, 1997:64). Before the Communist take over of 1944, there were around 740 Turkish schools in Bulgaria with some native Turkish speakers coming directly from Turkey (Eminov, 1997; Stoyanov, 1997).
The language of the ethnic Turks in Bulgaria changed after 1944 due to a number of reasons. First, along with the whole Bulgarian society, the Turks in Bulgaria underwent major social changes under the influence of the Communist ideology. These changes had no equivalent in Turkey. Thus, the language of the Bulgarian Turks started incorporating some “socialist” vocabulary. Typical words were “TKZS” (collective farm), “glaven agronom” (chief agronomist), “drugarka” (teacher, Mrs.), “Diyado Mraz” (the Soviet Russian equivalent of Santa Claus), “deveti septemvri” (9th of September, the day of the Socialist Revolution in 1944) and “purvi may” (1st of May, International Workers’ Day) (Eminov, 1997:151-152).
The rise of Bulgarian nationalism, the closure of Turkish schools between 1959 and 1970, the banning of the Turkish media and the usage of the Turkish language in private and public in 1984-1989 were the basis of the change of the locally spoken Turkish language. Ethnic Turks could no longer incorporate Turkish words in their language that corresponded to many spheres of their life. Bulgarian words filled in that gap. Moreover, Turkish names were changed with Bulgarian/Christian names, which reduced the Turkish vocabulary even more. The Turkish names inscribed on the graves were also subject to change.
In 1991 Bulgarian government passed the National Education Act and reintroduced Turkish language lessons in public schools. Today, Turkish children have Turkish language classes where they can make up classes of at least 12, which also imposes some resrtictions. This being the fact, Turkish language is still under pressure lacking enough learning and teaching materials as well as enough teachers. The materials are provided free of charge by the Turkish Ministry of Education, but are approved by Bulgarian Ministry of Eucation. The sign of Turkish identity like Turkish hymn, flag and the picture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, along with other parts of historical disputes were removed from the Turkish language books. This gives rise to poor vocabulary input and is considered insufficient for the needs of the minority.
After giving some background information on how was Turkish language changing or changed forcefully, I would like to carry on by questioning the situation of diglossia. Although the Turkish which is being spoken by Turks of Bulgaria has been influenced by Bulgarian through assymilation policies , is still mutually intelligible with the standard Turkish of Turkey. The differences include vocabulary and phonological aspects but not structural differences.
The language spoken by the Turks of Bulgaria has been written since Ottoman Era, and after 1040’s it has been written with the Latin alphabet. Turkish poets and writers have created some peoms, stories, songs, novels and folklore in Turkish dialect. In addition, apart from the last years of Communist Era, Turks have printed their own newspapers as well. Until 1980’s Turks of Bulgaria have had classes in Turkish, which were seized during the “Revivalist Process” between 1979-1989.
It is obvious that the books prepared by Turkish Republic are influencing the Turkish dialect, however this influence is towards purifying the Turkish dialect from Bulgarian influence. We would assume that these books bring back some of the Turkish vocabulary. They also give a systematic outlook to the Turkish dialect.
According to Charles Ferguson (1959) diglossia “is simply when diglossic speech communities have a High variety that is very prestigious and a Low variety with no official status which are in complementary distribution with each other, for instance the High variety might be used for literary discourse and the Low variety for ordinary conversation. His original definition of diglossia was that the two varieties which are in a diglossic relationship with each other are closely related, and therefore diglossia is not bilingualism. In his defining examples he points out that the High variety is always an acquired form, and that some educated native speakers might even deny that they ever use the Low variety. An important component of diglossia is that the speakers have the personal perception that the High variety is the "real" language and that the Low variety is "incorrect" usage.”
Wardhaugh (1998) states that diglossic situation is where more than one code exists and where there are ‘clear functional differences between the codes’ and these differences govern their use. High varieties are typically used for delivering sermons, formal lectures and legal and administrative transactions (eg. In courts of law, parliament, for political speeches and for radio broadcasting, editorials in newspapers, and for literature, etc). Low varieties might be used for giving instruction to workers in low-prestige occupations (eg, in countries where there are servants), in casual conversations, within family and social groups, on popular radio and television, etc. Usually low varieties are represented in literature as embedded discourse and used to characterise particular people from particular socio-economic levels. Only occasionally is a low variety used to write an entire literary work.
If these definitons are considered, it is clear that the Turks of Bulgaria use the same dialect for creating literature, education and religious practices. There’s no evidence that the written language and spoken language are used for different purposes and for different discourses. Turkish dialect in Bulgaria doesn’t have a distinction of high and low variety. Thus, we cannot conclude that there’s a diglossic situation in their language use.
References
Eminov, Ali (1997): “Turkish and Other Muslim Minorities in Bulgaria”, London: Hurst & Co.
Ferguson, C. (1996): Sociolinguistic Perspectives: Papers on Language in Society, 1959-1994, Oxford University Press
Grosjean, F. (1982): Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism, Harvard University Press
Hoepken, W. (1997): “From Religious Identity to Ethnic Mobilization: The Turks of Bulgaria Before, Under and Since, Communism, in Muslim Identity and the Balkan State”, (eds.) Hugh Poulton and Suha Taji Farouki, London
Poulton, Hugh. (1997). “Changing Notions of National Identity Among Muslims in Thrace and Macedonia: Turks, Pomaks and Roma.” in Hugh Poulton and Suha Taji-Farouki, eds., “Muslim Identity and the Balkan State”. (London: Hurst and Company).
Wardhaugh, R. (1998): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford USA.
Online
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/SEEFA/spring02.pdf.
http://ling.northwestern.edu/~wertheim/Chapter%201.pdf
http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/materialien/CZES3.pdf.
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