Has Your Linguistic Reform Gone Too Far? A Cautionary Tale
Dutch journalist, linguist, and polyglot Gaston Dorren has written several fascinating books for laypeople on language and languages; I loved his 2018 Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages, in which Dorren strolls the world, offering his readers fascinating glimpses of the 20 most-spoken languages in the world, including truly intriguing glances at Korean, Tamil, Punjabi, Swahili, and Portuguese, among others. He’s even able to sneak in some paragraphs about his native Dutch—not one of the 20 most-spoken languages—by comparing it extensively with Portuguese, looking at the contrasting trajectories of those two colonial languages, with Dutch shrinking tremendously from the 19th into the mid-20th century, while Portuguese expanded during the same time, and retained its prominence in Brazil and in parts of Africa.
Meanwhile, Dorren tells a hilarious story in his chapter on Turkish, chronicling the unintended consequences when President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938, president of Turkey 1923-1938), considered the father of modern Turkey, and a radical reformer in many areas, attempted “a radical transformation of the Turkish language during roughly the middle fifty years of the twentieth century.” Reviewing the state of the Turkish language at the time of his consolidation of power, Atatürk saw a hopelessly confused muddle, with the language’s vocabulary a strange mishmash of elements, including massive borrowings over time from Arabic, Farsi (Persian), French, and other languages. As a result, he decided that the language needed to be purified, and in 1932 authorized the creation of the Turkish Language Society, whose members in turn went ahead and collected tens of thousands of words with “pure” Turkic roots, compiling them in a work known as the Tarama Dergisi. Unfortunately, Dorren writes, “[E]nthusiastic purists took it as a reference work and ran with it. In doing so, they plunged Turkey into linguistic chaos. ‘For a while, Babel set in,’ as Geoffrey Lewis, a prominent authority on Turkish language policy [and the author of the book The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success—the main source for the anecdote], puts it,” as an army of specialized copy editors was empowered to replace every word of foreign origin with one of the native alternatives listed in the Tarama Dergisi. “But since this book often suggested several alternatives, sometimes dozens of them, and every substitutor could freely take his pick, the poor readers’ best hope was that he’d choose something they were able to understand…” Indeed, “It was during this turbulent period that, according to an oft-repeated anecdote which may or may not be apocryphal, a Turkish writer was asked how many languages he spoke. ‘It’s all I can do to keep up with Turkish,’ he’s said to have replied.” Ultimately, Atatürk shifted course in 1935, bringing the temporary chaos to a close.
All this speaks to the possibility of reform gone wrong. And while it’s never possible to predict for certain how any planned reform will go, thinking strategically about the near-term, and indeed also, long-term future, remains essential to leaders in any area of endeavor. The world of U.S. healthcare certainly is in great flux right now; we at Healthcare Innovation continue to try to help clarify the landscape for our readers. Beginning on p. 4, please see our Ten Transformative Trends articles. We hope that they are meaningful and are useful for our readers. There has never been a time of greater complexity in U.S. healthcare.
Meanwhile, when it comes to linguistic concerns, the Atatürk story certainly opens a window onto what could happen when one opens a Pandora’s box around language!
