“Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A Nation in the Making

Abstract

This article analyzes one of the attempts to broaden the use of the Turkish language during the first two decades of the Turkish Republic in order to create a homogeneous nation-state. The “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign, which aimed to put pressure on non-Turkish speakers to speak Turkish in public, shows that a state-centered analysis is inadequate to explain the nation-building process in Turkey. This article demonstrates how the official Turkification policies were supported, recreated, and implemented by a social network composed of those who considered themselves the state's missionaries. It also discusses the debates and conflicts among the nationalists, both at the state and social level, about the boundaries of the Turkish nation.

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