| The Kurds’ issue represents the most serious and unresolved ethnic problem in contemporary Turkey.Because of Turkey’s "one state,one nation,one language"nation-building principle,Turkish,as the only official language has become a tool for the promotion of Turkish nationalism.Kurdish people have thus gone through assimilation,which arose the Kurdish Mother Tongue Movement and the concern from Iraqi Kurdish and the EU,both of which complicates Turkey’s language problem.As a result,the complicated language problem increased difficulties in solving the ethnic problem in Turkey.This,in turn,could stoke the Turkish--Kurdish language conflict as well.This study makes a sociological analysis on Turkey’s language conflicts and language policies,and elaborates how varied social and political aspects can affect the relationship between the languages of Turkish and Kurdish.It combines theories in language policy with conflict theories to dig up the dialectical relationship between language policy’ and language conflict.It finds out that the imbalanced development of Turkish and Kurdish nationalism,the process of nation-building,as well as the high politicization of languages are the driving forces behind current language conflicts in Turkey.The key to the regulation of language conflict is to set up feasible language policies to increase the empowering capacity of Kurdish language and to push forward the legitimation of Kurdish people’s language right.To sum it up,Turkey’s language conflict is derived from the potential disparity between majority and minority languages in the nation-building process of modern Turkey,which is also a tricky problem that broadly exists in most of the multinational countries.This study takes a fresh perspective by combing the conflict theory and language conflict theory and intends to make contributions to a deeper understanding in Turkey’s Kurdish problem,and to the researches of language policy and language conflict as well. |
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