Changing ideologies about Arabic in Turkey and the consequences in Antioch

Abstract

Arabic was unwanted by the designers and founders of the Republic of Turkey (founded in 1923) and prohibited in public space in the 1980s. Its status started changing in the late 1990s and 2000s, when it became increasingly offered in state education as a foreign language. By looking at the place of Arabic and the impact of the language policies of the Republic of Turkey then and now, the aim of this article is to investigate the consequences of these recent changes on the language ideologies of Turkish citizens in southern Turkey whose inherited familial language is Arabic but who are experiencing language shift to Turkish, the national language. Rooted in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in Antioch, shows that due to their religious and language background these citizens have lengthy experience of minoritization. Qualitative analysis of their language ideologies shows on the one hand a desire to maintain Arabic, but on the other hand conflicting views about the variety of Arabic they speak and a tendency to be influenced by pro-Turkish language ideologies. The paper concludes by re-evaluating the language shift they have experienced.

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