Turkish Language Association

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Logo of the Turkish Language Association

The Turkish Language Association (Turkish: Türk Dil Kurumu - TDK) is the official regulatory body of the Turkish language, founded on July 12, 1932 and headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The association acts as the official authority on the language (without any enforcement power), contributes to linguistic research on Turkish and other Turkic languages, and is charged with publishing the official dictionary of the language.

1 History
2 Functions
3 Publications
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

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The association was established on July 12, 1932 under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti (Society for Research on the Turkish Language) by the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, by Samih Rıfat, Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın, Celâl Sahir Erozan and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, all prominent names in the literature of the period and members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The head specialist and Secretary General of the association was the Armenian linguist Agop Dilaçar starting from 1934, who continued to work in the association until his death in 1979.

[edit] Functions

The association heads the scientific efforts for linguistic research on the Turkish language and its sister Turkic languages of Central Asia. Another primary mission of the association is to maintain and publish Türkçe Sözlük, the official Turkish dictionary, and Yazım Kılavuzu, the Turkish writing guide, in addition to many other specialized dictionaries, linguistics books and several periodicals.

The association strives to protect the integrity of the Turkish language and was a key institution in the struggle of the Republic of Turkey to re-position itself as a secular nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the 1930s and 1940s, it has led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic, Persian, Greek and French loanwords whose immense use in the Turkish language during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Republic had created a literary language considerably different from the spoken Turkish of the time, which is now called Ottoman Turkish.

Recently however, the attention of the association has been turned towards another threat, not only to the Turkish language, but to many other languages as well: The globalization and the spread of English. This phenomenon has resulted in the infiltration of many languages by many English words and Turkish has not been spared. Since the 1980s, TDK constantly campaigns for the use of the Turkish equivalents of these English words. It also has the task of scientifically deriving such words from existing Turkish roots if no such equivalents exist. It actively promotes the adoption of such words instead of their English equivalents in the daily lives of the Turkish people. Some successful examples of such suggestions for IT terms include:

English loanword	computer	hardware	software	digital	processor
Turkish equivalent	bilgisayar	donanım	yazılım	sayısal	işlemci

Turkey currently doesn't have a legal framework to enforce by law the recommendations of TDK in public life (contrary to France, for example). On the other hand, there is a bill that is in consideration in the Turkish Parliament at the moment that will give TDK and the Ministries of Education and Culture the tools to enforce legally the labelling of Turkish equivalents of these words next to their foreign counterparts, particularly in the news media, advertising, and commercial communications.

[edit] Publications

The association, in addition to maintaining Türkçe Sözlük and Yazım Kılavuzu has published more than 850 linguistics related books, mainly consisting of studies on Turkic languages, specialized dictionaries, philological books, and works of literature.

TDK also publishes Türk Dili, a journal on Turkish literature, since 1951, Belleten, the annual journal on Turkic languages, since 1953, and Türk Dünyası, another periodical published twice a year on Turkish language and literature since 1996.