Questioning of the elite dominance theory

[Larry Trask]

Geoffrey Summers writes:

[LT]

>> The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total
>> replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish.

> Is this sweeping statement correct?.

Yes; I think so.  Turkish is today the mother tongue of about 90%
of the population of Turkey.  Most of the rest are speakers of Kurdish,
in a large eastern area.  A number of other languages are spoken
by smaller groups, mostly along the borders: Laz and other Caucasian
languages next to the Caucasus, Azerbaijani and Arabic along the
eastern and southern borders, and so on.  There are a few other
odds and ends.  When I was living in Turkey, I was told that there
was a single Polish-speaking village somewhere in the middle of
the country.  I never got to see it, but anyway I doubt that Polish
was already spoken in Anatolia before the Ottoman conquest.

> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900?

The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of
Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a
large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all
of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war.  So far as I know,
the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically.

> How long did the replacement take?

I simply don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows.  Greek was
the prestige language before the Turkish conquest, but I've never
seen even a guess as to how many mother tongues were spoken in
Byzantine Anatolia, or as to how long any of these languages lasted
after the conquest.  I would certainly be interested in finding out,
if anybody knows of any work on this topic.

> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands
> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia?

Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking
about Anatolia.

> What was the Ottoman court language.

As far as I know, it was Ottoman Turkish.

> To go one step further, the script was changed. To what extent did the
> change of script (rather than, say, cultural or political orientation)
> influence the incorporation of European words into modern Turkish?

An interesting question, but probably not very much.  Ottoman
Turkish was already full of loanwords from European languages
at the time of the Turkish revolution.  Indeed, alongside his
switch to the roman alphabet, Atatürk charged the Turkish Linguistic
Society with finding "pure" Turkish replacements for words of
foreign origin.  Most of these words were from Arabic or Persian,
of course, but hundreds of them were from European languages,
especially from French, but also from German, Italian, English
and perhaps Greek.  The new script doubtless made it easier to write
these words in an orderly way, but they were already in use in
everyday speech.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
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