The reception of the European typological classification of languages by the reformers of the Turkish language (1932-1936)

Abstract

The fact that the Turkish language was classified as an agglutinative language by traditional European linguistics was accepted, but also contested by the Turkish language reformers of the 1930s. This was due to the fact that, most of the time, the classification into language families was accompanied by harsh judgements about the cultural and intellectual level of the speakers of this or that family, as well as about the capabilities of this or that language. It is interesting to note that Turkish linguists did not question this kind of prejudice towards non-Indo-European languages and their speakers, but tried to solve this "problem" on a linguistic and theoretical level. It was mainly between 1932 and 1936 that this issue was discussed.