21st Century Ottoman: The Ottoman Turkish Linguistic Revival in Digital Affinity Spaces

In 2014, the Turkish National Education Council recommending teaching Ottoman Turkish as a mandatory subject in all high schools. Since that time, this historical register of the Turkish language has been making a popular comeback. This is especially true online, where participants are creating and sharing new content written in Ottoman. This article examines evidence of the revival of Ottoman Turkish in digital “affinity spaces” in order to show it is not only being excavated, but is developing independently from its own historical past. In taking into consideration new calligraphic styles, the political and cultural subtext of memes, and the rewriting of modern Turkish back into the Ottoman lexicon, this paper will identify the form of Ottoman emerging in digital spaces as a unique new iteration of the language

Voices on Trial in Al-Maqāmāt Al-Aswāniyyah

Al-Maqāmāt Al-Aswāniyyah (1970) are a collection of modern maqāmāt featuring a cast of characters from Cairo’s literary scene in the late 1960s. Written by the Egyptian lawyer and author ʻAbbās al-Aswānī (1926-1978), they were a casual and contemporary iteration of the genre, depicting everything from nightlife to Nasserism. They were so modern, in fact, that they were even adapted as a radio serial for Ṣawt Al-ʿArab. But despite these maqāmāt’s stylistic distance from their belletrist predecessors, and without recourse to a stereotypical use of the Egyptian dialect, al-Aswānī performs a satisfying linguistic satire worthy of the genre. Pushing back against common folk-linguistic understandings of the carnivalesque, this article looks to new work in linguistics and narratology as a way to explain how al-Aswānī’s casual, radio-friendly Maqāmāt still honor the genre’s tradition of performing multi-tiered parody, social satire, and metaliterary irony

Arabic Digital Culture

This open textbook serves as a guide to digital cultural immersion in the Arab world. Each chapter looks at a different country, theme, and medium of Arab culture online. They look at specific sites and conversations taking place online, and offer suggestions and tips for how to engage with the content. The book is meant as a guide to culture immersion, and not as formal language instruction, and so the lessons are generally open-ended, suggesting topics and mediums to explore culture without giving specific instructions or tasks. That being said, while this book may be used by students with no knowledge of the Arabic language, an effort has been made to also spend some time on specific vocabulary or grammar features of the language for those who are interested

Languages of rupture : language ideology and the modern novel in Egypt and Turkey

In arguing for the central role of language in the creation of the modern nationalist imaginary, scholars of recent literary histories of both Egypt and Turkey have focused a great deal of energy on commonly accepted narratives of linguistic dysfunction. In Egypt and other Arabic speaking countries, the “diglossia problem” has been the locus for conversations about monologic subjectivity, colonial violence, and the counter-hegemonic politics of language. In Turkey, the language reforms are said to have created a mix of cultural aphasia and historical amnesia, brought on in particular by self-inflicted lexical impoverishment. In these accounts, both popular and scholarly, the epistemic ruptures of modernity are embedded in language itself. However, from the perspective of linguistics, both of these apparent dysfunctions are ideological projections, having little to do with either language’s actual communicative functions and everything to do with the social meaning of variation, in a word indexicality. Taking seriously the insights of indexicality, this dissertation argues for a different account of the relationship between language, ideology, and literature. Such an account aims not only to expose the whorfian underpinnings of many previous literary histories, but to recast literature’s relationship to national language as one not of coercion and resistance, but one in which literature itself benefits narratologically from the forms that standard language ideology provides.Middle Eastern Studie

Ottomania and the Revival of Intertextual Practices in Contemporary Turkish Literature

This paper looks at trends in contemporary Turkish literature to see how classic categories of Ottoman poetics are showing up in modern novels

Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde : dialogic speech as subaltern insurgency

This paper will argue that Orhan Kemal’s 1954 novel, Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde, uses a predominance of dialogic speech as a narratological strategy which allows for the represention (Darstellung) of subaltern voices rather than a speaking on their behalf (Vertretung). Countering Spivak’s claim that the intellectual erases the subaltern’s speech through his/her attempts to represent it, Orhan Kemal is able to portray rural Anatolia because dialogic speech is irreducibly indexical to the sociolinguistic complexities and political contestations of the social world. In additon, subaltern consciousness will be shown to emerge intersubjectively through dialogue rather than as a effect of discrete class positions or political revelations. This paper will perform a sociolinguistic analysis of the speech found in Bereketli Topraklar Üzerinde to show how individuals in conversational speech perform and contest identities, how they express and agree upon knowledge, and how the indeterminacy and open-ended nature of their speech holds open a space against the enclosing pressure for it to become a “text-for-knowledge”.Middle Eastern Studie

Vatandaş, Türkçe Konuş: Language Ideology in the Work of Ziya Gökalp

This paper uses a language ideology framework to look at the work of the early 20th century Turkologist Ziya Gokalp's work