Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

ANKARA: The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • ANKARA: The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora

    BIAnet, Turkey
    Oct 17 2014


    The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora

    The association of the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its
    politics makes many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of
    Turkish in the lives of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan
    descendants.

    Jennifer Manoukian
    Ä°stanbul - BIA News Desk

    There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables
    in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew
    my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice
    behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the
    split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As
    the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring
    eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I
    managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part
    of my language too.

    That was the microcosmic encounter between two nations notoriously
    divided: a non-conversation through a handful of words that belong to
    us both. It was an encounter rooted in another time, another world
    away'a time before ethno-linguistic nationalism led Armenians and
    Turks to retreat into their languages and fortify them against each
    other, a time before the Turkish people held exclusive rights to the
    Turkish language, and a time before the Armenian people felt a
    visceral unease towards most things Turkish.

    This scene recalls the intimate relationship that Ottoman Armenians
    once had with the Turkish language. Although this relationship grew
    strained nearly a century ago when most of the community was pushed
    into the diaspora, among many of the descendants of this community
    there remains a quiet, reticent affection for the language that still
    echoes today in far-flung corners of the Armenian diaspora.

    Turkish: A Language of the Ottoman Armenians

    How can the relationship between a people and their imperial language
    be framed as a transnational, multigenerational love affair in good
    faith? Other imperial contexts point to the striking implausibility of
    this scenario. The tendency of imperial powers to use language to sink
    their claws deeper into the minds of the colonized, strip them of
    their cultural identities, and tighten their grip on the territory
    they aim to pillage might prompt a raised eyebrow at the metaphor. But
    there is a distinction to be made between an Algerian's relationship
    to French, an Indian's relationship to English, and an Ottoman
    Armenian's relationship to Turkish.

    The first distinction concerns the widespread exposure of the Armenian
    community to Turkish during the Ottoman period. Ottoman
    Armenians'urban and rural, elite and non-elite'existed in a society
    where Turkish was the lingua franca in their cities and towns. The
    language was not, as was the case in other imperial contexts, spoken
    solely by the ruling minority and their collaborators; on the
    contrary, Turkish was the dominant language, from the palace to the
    marketplace, and permeated all aspects of public life. The Armenian
    community was, therefore, compelled, to varying degrees, to assimilate
    Turkish in order to function in the society around them.

    The Ottoman Armenian relationship to Turkish was also deepened by the
    length of time it had to develop. The presence of the imperial
    language was not a blip on the timeline of a nation, nor did it
    permeate just an elite tier of society. Turkish was pervasive for four
    centuries, not only formally in the bureaucracy, but also informally
    in cross-confessional interactions in the multilingual towns and
    villages of Anatolia.

    But it is one distinct outcome of the centuries-long predominance of
    Turkish that sets the Ottoman Armenian relationship with the Turkish
    language apart from cases of other colonized peoples. Naturally, the
    enduring presence of Turkish and its centrality in public life led
    many Ottoman Armenians to slip Turkish words into their Armenian
    conversations, but by the nineteenth century, there were large
    communities of Armenians across Anatolia with little knowledge of the
    Armenian language. Centered largely in Cilicia, Yozgat, and Ankara,
    these Ottoman Armenians spoke Turkish exclusively and had learned it
    as their mother tongue.

    The Turkish language might have initially been perceived as the
    language of imperial domination, but over the course of generations,
    it became the only one many Ottoman Armenians knew. It was the
    language they loved in, grieved in, joked in, fought in. In other
    words, Turkish became a language that belonged as much to the
    Armenians as it did to anyone else.

    Turkish in Other Alphabets

    In the late Ottoman period, religion was the supreme determinant of
    national belonging. If religion took precedence over language, it
    meant that, as long as Turkish-speaking Armenians identified as
    Christian, they were still considered part of the Armenian community.

    This phenomenon was certainly not unique to Ottoman Armenians. Until
    the triumphant rise of ethno-linguistic nationalism in the first
    decades of the twentieth century, Turkish was a language largely
    unburdened by the constraints of religion and ethnicity. Turkish as an
    Ottoman language can be seen most vividly in the print cultures of
    non-Muslim communities in the Empire.

    These were groups who knew the letters, but not the language, of their
    liturgies. For the Greek Orthodox Karamanli community, there are
    examples of Turkish written in the Greek alphabet. For a certain
    subset of the Jewish community, there are texts in Turkish written in
    the Hebrew alphabet, as well as Turkish-language materials written in
    the Syriac alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Assyrian community.

    But by far the most imposing is the corpus of Turkish-language novels,
    translations, newspapers, religious texts, dictionaries, and textbooks
    written in the Armenian alphabet for the Turkish-speaking Armenian
    community of the Ottoman Empire. In a span of two hundred years, over
    one hundred periodicals and two thousand books were published in what
    became known as Armeno-Turkish.

    The bulk of these Armeno-Turkish materials were published in the final
    decades of the Ottoman Empire, which suggests a particularly robust
    Turkish-speaking Armenian community on the eve of the Armenian
    genocide. Knowing that the vast majority of survivors from this
    period, regardless of the language they spoke, fled into exile, a
    thorny question emerges: What became of the Turkish language in the
    early years of the Armenian diaspora once the Turkish-speaking
    Armenian communities of Anatolia were expected to dissolve into the
    larger Armenian-speaking community? How was the use of Turkish by
    Armenians in the post-genocide diaspora understood once it took on a
    new dimension as the language of the perpetrator?

    Attempts to achieve national cohesion in the aftermath of the genocide
    centered largely on language. In Armenian schools and orphanages in
    the Near East, there was a particular focus on shedding Turkish and
    mastering Armenian as a way to foster a national renaissance among the
    fraction of the Armenian community that survived. Whereas the language
    attitudes of the children could be cultivated in favor of Armenian, a
    lifetime of brushing up against Turkish was not so easily forgotten in
    their parents' and grandparents' generation. As language and ethnicity
    became more and more intimately intertwined in the Armenian diaspora,
    the children became part of a national system that had trouble making
    sense of their older Turkish-speaking relatives.

    The exclusion of Turkish from the national system created two spheres
    governed by two languages; it is this public/private division that is
    at the heart of the Armenian diaspora's relationship to Turkish today.
    In the early years of the diaspora in the Near East, Europe, and the
    Americas, three languages were in constant contact: the standard
    Armenian of school and community life; the Turkish or Armenian dialect
    of home life; and the language of the host country. Leaving this last
    complicating layer aside, Armenian was privileged as the language of
    the diaspora, while Turkish was pushed behind closed doors and
    maintained in private. The continuation of Armeno-Turkish publications
    in places like New York, Boston, and Buenos Aires well into the 1960s
    illustrates that, despite the push for linguistic homogeneity, there
    was an unwillingness to abandon Turkish in favor of Armenian among the
    last generation of Armenians born in the Ottoman Empire.

    This continued use of Turkish in the early years of the diaspora helps
    explain the seemingly paradoxical way the Armenian diaspora relates to
    Turkish today. The transmission of Turkish from the survivor
    generation to the first generation born in the diaspora produced
    children who straddled the two languages. In this generation, there
    are Armenians who are hiding an excellent command of Turkish, thanks
    to the conversations they overheard between parents who would use
    Turkish to try to speak privately in front of their children, thanks
    to the Nasrettin Hoca stories they were told, and thanks to the
    practice they got transcribing Turkish messages into Armenian letters
    on behalf of Turkish-speaking relatives who never learned to write.

    Fossilized Turkish

    After nearly a century, the Armenian diaspora still lives with the
    linguistic fragments of its Ottoman past. Turkish was certainly at its
    strongest among Armenians in the early years of the diaspora, but by
    no means have the second, third, or fourth generations completely lost
    touch with the language. Turkish is firmly implanted in the colloquial
    Western Armenian spoken among descendants of Ottoman Armenians from
    both Turkish- and Armenian-speaking families. Mixing in Turkish is
    still so commonplace in conversation that it is a great compliment to
    be known to speak makour [clean] Armenian.

    So deeply are Turkish words and expressions embedded in the daily
    language of family life that it often takes an Armenian language class
    to reveal the Turkish origins of some of the most frequently used
    words. In classrooms across the diaspora, students are learning that
    they are not the only ones who call their grandfathers dede, or say
    haydi to get their friends moving or sus to get them to be quiet. They
    are not the only ones calling eggplant patlıcan, pouring coffee into a
    fincan, or expressing their disbelief with a sighing babam. Certainly
    Armenian equivalents of these words exist, but for many, they feel
    stilted or artificially engineered when compared to the Turkish words
    associated with the warmth of childhood.

    Feelings about Turkish in the Armenian diaspora do, however, vary
    greatly. Anger at the Turkish government's continued denial of the
    Armenian genocide has led some to be wary of all things Turkish,
    including the language. This attitude, however, is a reaction to the
    injustice that the Turkish language has come to represent over the
    past century. The relationship between Turkish and Armenian people
    long predates the Armenian genocide. To see Turkish as a pollutant and
    to try to eliminate all traces of the language from colloquial
    Armenian is to ignore the historical lineage of the Armenian people.

    Centuries of proximity to the Turkish language cannot be easily
    undone. Many Armenians in the diaspora bear these historical ties in
    their names, ranging from the practical (Boyaciyan [son of a painter],
    Terziyan [son of a tailor], Kuyumciyan [son of a jeweler]) to the
    perplexing (Altıparmakyan [son of someone with six fingers], Dilsizyan
    [son of someone without a tongue], and Deveciyan [son of a camel
    driver]).

    Many Armenians also bear these ties in the pronunciation of the
    Turkish words they have retained. Having been estranged from the
    language during the linguistic reforms of the early Turkish Republic,
    there is a fossilized form of Ottoman-era Turkish that exists not in
    Turkey, but in homes throughout the Armenian diaspora. Since contact
    with Turkish broke after the genocide, the language was frozen in 1915
    and has been transmitted in this outdated form to subsequent
    generations. As a result, Armenians across the diaspora, who have
    inherited Turkish rather than studied it, tend to pronounce words like
    lokhum or çocukh like Anatolian peasants from another age.

    The ties can also be seen in the way Armenians in the diaspora have
    appropriated Turkish and created with it. For instance, in the case of
    the Turkish zevzek, the word is taken and subjected to the rules of
    Armenian noun formation to emerge in a hybrid form as zevzekutiun.
    This phenomenon can also be seen with the Armenian diminutive suffix
    `ig - , creating words like canig from the word can. Conversely,
    Armenian words can also be subjected to the rules of Turkish grammar
    to invent hybrid expressions. For example, in the colloquial Armenian
    expression çe mı [isn't it?], the Turkish interrogative participle mı
    is added to the Armenian word to create a question with a grammatical
    form that only exists in Turkish.

    A Momentary Suspension of Politics

    The Armenian genocide dispossessed Ottoman Armenians of nearly
    everything but their language. In the years immediately following the
    genocide, efforts to stomp out Turkish words and expressions from
    everyday language did not triumph over the domestic sphere where
    Turkish has endured in colloquial Western Armenian.

    The politics that Turkish came to represent after the fall of the
    Ottoman Empire, however, have added a certain ambivalence to the use
    of the language since the early years of the Armenian diaspora. While
    certain Turkish words and expressions may awaken happy family
    memories, the towering position of Armenian genocide denial in
    diasporan Armenian culture affects the way the Turkish language is
    perceived in the Armenian diaspora. In other words, the association of
    the Turkish language with the Turkish state and its politics makes
    many wary of acknowledging the indelible place of Turkish in the lives
    of Ottoman Armenians and their diasporan descendants.

    Amid the ambivalence that Turkish generates, there are flashes of a
    momentary disconnect between language and politics where pre-1915
    Armenian attitudes towards Turkish'ones shaped more by ease of
    expression than by the pain that the language has grown to symbolize
    today'can be seen. These dueling attitudes can exist even within a
    single individual: within an Armenian-American who boycotts Turkish
    hazelnuts and soothes himself with Turkish proverbs his grandmother
    would recite to him as a child; within a French-Armenian who
    demonstrates against genocide denial every 24 April and coos yavrum
    (or yavrus, replacing the Turkish suffix with the Armenian one) to her
    children; within a Lebanese-Armenian who rails against the destruction
    of Ottoman Armenian cultural heritage sites in Anatolia with the
    colorful Turkish curses always on the tip of his tongue.

    The private dimension of the legacy of Turkish in the Armenian
    diaspora makes it almost invisible to those outside the Armenian
    community, particularly to those in Turkey who may have little idea
    that the Ottoman past continues to breathe through the language of the
    Armenians.

    * This article originally appeared on Jadaliyya.

    http://www.bianet.org/english/world/159235-the-legacy-of-turkish-in-the-armenian-diaspora

Working...
X