Naming and Nation-building in Turkey

The Republic of Turkey, successor to the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, was declared in 1923, and thereafter, its government led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) launched a series of reforms. These reforms aimed to sever the new republic’s ties with the imperial past, to catch up with Western sociocultural and political standards, and to consolidate a homogenized nationalized citizenry. In Turkish official sources, these reforms are known as Atatürk Inkilapları (Atatürk revolutions). One of the last reforms, the Surname Law of 1934, ruled that citizens adopt Turkish language surnames and gave them two years to register these names at population offices. Citizens were restricted in their choices by Article Three of the law: Names with reference to foreign nationalities, races, tribes, and morally inappropriate and ugly names were prohibited. This book explores this law’s genesis in the cultural nationalist imaginary, drafting in parliamentary debates, its nurturing by the Language Reform, and variously mediated popular reception among citizenry. My project draws from oral historical interviews, parliamentary debates, archival documents, visual and written material from popular media, and previously untapped documents from registries.

The linguistic stock for the names adopted during the application of the Surname Law came from a variety of sources. In the late Ottoman decades archeological findings and the discovery of manuscripts repositioned Turkish in the evolutionary thinking of the time. The late Ottoman simplification efforts and the purist language reform of the 1930s utilized these findings and manuscripts. After the romanization of the alphabet in 1928, the radical language reform efforts from 1932-1934 involved the purge of Arabic and Persian elements from Turkish, and also involved the mobilization of the public to collect folk idioms and spoken vernaculars for the Tarama Dergisi, a glossary of equivalents to Ottoman Turkish. The Turkish History Thesis claimed that Turks were the ancestors of all the brachycephalic peoples, and by implication the rightful inhabitants of Anatolia. The disputed Sun Language Theory of 1936 claimed that Turkish was the ancestor of all languages. Surname booklets, which were written to help citizens produce unique Turkish surnames, were a product of these processes, replicating the methods of the language reform, and putting into circulation a stock of morphemes, and phonemes that would eventually transform the onomastic texture of Turkey’s populace.

A perceived problem during the reception of the law was how a limited number of Turkish names would be used to issue surnames to the relatively large population of Turkey. The solution: surname generator booklets. A number of booklets were published by a variety of government and non-government presses after the announcement of the law. Notes on documents and attached correspondence between population offices and between citizens and officials indicated the specific reasons why names were not approved. Agency and genealogical awareness was the privilege and domain of male family members and was very prevalent among urban elites, many of whom carefully chose, or tailored names. A piece of correspondence between two population officials in Istanbul points to the lack of standard communication among offices concerning procedures for minorities. Documents show that members of non-Muslim Greek minority families not only negotiated but also resisted the imposition of names by officials. Armenian families often kept their names, but also took Turkic sounding names, and some carefully kept a syllable of the old name in the new Turkish name.

Surname adoption stories based on a selected number of interviews reveal a variety of “surnaming” experiences ranging from bestowal and choice, to assignation in absentia by officials, and even a purchase. The narratives show us the manner in which the law entered into families’ lives, and the amount of leverage family members perceived having at the time. Each narrative provides an account of the social ties through which a surname became associated with a family, opening a window onto the political economy in which names and words circulated. Since they are responses to the question, “How did you get your surname?” narratives about surname adoption describe what Asif Agha calls “baptismal events,” performative speech events whose discursive regularity, or pairing, then circulates in “speech chain networks” to merge the bearer and name, to give social life to the law.

The Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities had been granted official minority status by the treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and were guaranteed the right to have their schools, associations, and to speak their language, yet the defensive nationalism that was prevalent at the time created exclusionary practices in daily life and in institutions.Members of non-Muslim minorities were exempt from the law but many felt pressured to Turkify their names or neutralize markers of their ethnic affiliation. Armenian families often discarded the –ian ending. It is likely that name change was more common in larger cities where interaction with the Muslim majority was more frequent and where the prospect of integration of children in schools and youth in military necessitated a surname that did not attract undue attention. Moreover, it was also more likely among families who had been displaced. Interview materials speak to the loss of security that many experienced in a political atmosphere that privileged ethnic Turkish and Muslim populations. Armenian and Jewish respondents invariably referred to the law designating professions to the Turkish population. The selected interviews, by no means comprehensive, describe the particular semiotic burden that a family name would carry. The small but significant selection of documents from the population offices in Istanbul reveal processes of negotiation between officials and members of the Greek and Armenian communities, as well as varying attitudes toward the minorities, ultimately pointing toward a lack of standardization that was widespread, but also to an uncertain relationship of the Turkish state to its non-Muslim minorities.

This chapter utilizes, literary sources, legal booklets, news media, and other sources to examine how the legacy of the Surname Law has unfolded since the 1930s. From the late 1940s onwards, the law’s Turkist critics denounced it for having alienated Turks from their authentic naming culture. A particularly vocal intellectual embodying these views, Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu (1901–1974), a sociologist, folklorist, and legal scholar, published a series of articles criticizing the law and its incompatibility with the original intentions of Ziya Gökalp. Meanwhile, legal booklets by lawyers indicate that many citizens applied to courts to change family names inadvertently taken or assigned in the 1930s. By the 1980s and 90s, names and language were also the focus of the two movements that challenged the established order: Islamists and Kurds. In the 1980s, an encyclopedia by an Islamist group claimed that the law on to abolish titles and language reform targeted Islam, while newspapers also published accounts of Kurdish families having difficulty registering Kurdish names for their children. Today, the names that citizens can be called continue to be a site where Turkish citizens make claims about their history and ethnicity and where the state articulates the limits of its inclusivity. 

Coinciding with the Language Reform’s search for a purified language, the Surname Law left behind it a plethora of words collected during a time of zealous language planning. A Turkish literary scholar argues that many current surnames are pure Turkish words that never made it into everyday spoken or written language but remained as relics of the Language Reform. Since the enforcement of the law in the 1930s, many families have taken their cases to court to reclaim old family names, or to claim a more flattering name.