Lubunca: The Historical Development of Istanbul's Queer Slang and a Social-Functional Approach to Diachronic Processes in Language

This project is the result of research into the history of the Queer community in Istanbul and the form and nature of their variety of slang, known within the community as Lubunca..;The purpose of this project is threefold: First (section 1) to describe the structure of Lubunca, both in terms of the origins of those words particular to or particularly common in it (section 1.2) and in terms of its phonetic/phonological (1.3), morphosyntactic (1.4), and semantic (1.5) peculiarities vis-a-vis other varieties of Turkish; second (section 2) to establish Lubunca as the result of interaction between unregistered gay male and trans female sex workers and ethnolinguistic minorities in the Beyoglu and Sisli districts of Istanbul in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and early years of the Turkish Republic; and third (section 3) to extrapolate on the basis of links between aspects of Lubunca and factors within the extra-linguistic environment in which it has evolved and is evolving some general rules which may be applicable to other examples of language change.;I assert that Queer slang varieties exist in a liminal position vis-a-vis the sociolinguistic market of the society at large, operating neither in accordance with nor in direct contradiction of its rules. I also posit a framework for visualizing language evolution as the interplay between availability of linguistic material and motivation for borrowing that material, which takes as the initiation of contact-induced language change the initial acquisition of a linguistic unit and its redeployment by the initial adopter within a new linguistic setting.