2. Intellectual Precursors and Cultural Context: Turkology, Language Reform, and Surnames

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.