Latest / The Story of Turkey: From Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire to Today — Fexingo History / Atatürk's Silent Revolution: Language Reform in Turkey
Transcript
- Lucas: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the wars that built the Republic and the treaties that drew its borders, but there’s another battle that was fought entirely with ink and paper. Luna: The alphabet reform? Lucas: Exactly. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal ordered the complete replacement of the Arabic script with a Latin-based one. It wasn’t a gradual shift; it was a legislative hammer drop that changed how every literate Turk read and wrote by the end of the year. Luna: That sounds incredibly disruptive for anyone over thirty. Lucas: It was. But before we get into the mechanics of how they pulled off such a massive logistical feat, I want to mention that this show is ad-free because of listeners like you. If you appreciate that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's F. E. X. I. N. G. O. Luna: Got it, thanks for keeping it clean. Lucas: Back to the reform. The key figure driving the technical side was İsmet İnönü, who would later become the second president but was then the Prime Minister. He chaired the committee that designed the new alphabet, working closely with linguists who wanted to capture the distinct vowel sounds of Turkish that the Arabic script simply couldn't handle accurately. Luna: So the old script was phonetically limiting? Lucas: Precisely. The Arabic script is consonantal, meaning vowels are often implied or marked with diacritics that most people didn't use anyway. Turkish has vowel harmony, where vowels in a word must match in frontness or backness. The new seven-vowel system in the Latin alphabet made reading out loud almost perfectly aligned with spelling. Luna: I remember reading that they had to teach millions of adults in a hurry. Lucas: They did. They established the Union of Teachers and created the Halkevleri, or People's Houses, which became community centers across the country. Teachers were sent to villages, and even government officials were required to attend night classes. If you couldn't learn the new letters, you couldn't be promoted. Luna: Was there pushback from the religious establishment? Lucas: Massive. Many clerics argued that abandoning the Arabic script was an attack on Islam itself, since the Quran is written in Arabic. Rıfat Hilmi, a prominent scholar, led vocal protests, claiming it would sever Turks from their Islamic heritage. But Mustafa Kemal was unmoved, viewing the old script as a barrier to modernization and scientific progress. Luna: Did the literacy rates actually jump after the switch? Lucas: Yes, though it took a few years to fully realize. Within three years, literacy rates doubled, and by the late thirties, they had tripled compared to the Ottoman era. The simplicity of the twenty-nine-letter alphabet meant children could read within weeks rather than months. Luna: And what about the words themselves? Did they keep the old vocabulary? Lucas: That was the next phase, known as the Language Cleanliness movement. Once the script was fixed, they launched a campaign to purge Arabic and Persian loanwords. They revived old Turkic words from historical texts and coined new ones to replace foreign terms, especially in science and administration. Luna: That must have sounded very different to older speakers. Lucas: It created a generational divide. A grandfather might speak a version of Turkish heavily infused with Arabic phrases, while his grandson spoke a purified, more direct form. Writers like Yahya Kemal faced criticism for resisting these changes, leading to intense debates in journals about the soul of the Turkish language. Luna: Did they ever look back at classical poetry? Lucas: They tried, but it was difficult. Reading Yunus Emre or Rumi in the original Arabic script became a specialized skill, like reading Chaucer in Middle English today. The state-sponsored education system focused on modern literature, leaving much of the classical canon to scholars rather than the general public. Luna: So it was a deliberate break from the past. Lucas: Absolutely. Mustafa Kemal saw the Ottoman past as a burden. By changing the alphabet, he forced a cognitive reset. You can't easily access the archives of your predecessors if you can't read their handwriting. It was a tool for shaping a new national consciousness, oriented toward Europe rather than the Middle East. Luna: Did any other countries try something similar? Lucas: Azerbaijan and several Central Asian republics under Soviet rule adopted Latin scripts in the twenties before being forced to switch to Cyrillic in the thirties. After the USSR collapsed, they switched back to Latin again. Turkey remains unique in maintaining the Latin script without interruption. Luna: It seems like a permanent structural change. Lucas: It is. Even today, when people discuss restoring the Arabic script, it’s viewed as impractical and nostalgic rather than a viable policy. The reform succeeded so well that the majority of Turks today cannot read the Ottoman documents of their own ancestors. Luna: That’s a profound loss of direct access to history. Lucas: It is. But proponents argue that it freed the language from religious constraints and allowed it to evolve rapidly. It’s a trade-off between continuity and modernization, one that defines modern Turkish identity to this day. Luna: Makes you wonder how much our own scripts shape our thinking. Lucas: That’s a good question to carry with us. When you change the tools people use to record thought, you inevitably change the thoughts themselves.