Turkish Language Act Ban
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A significant event is the infamous "Language Act Ban" of 1983. The Language Act Ban had tried to control the dissemination of separationist ideas through controlling the language of the public. The law was extremely unpopular as this kind of control was not used even during the chaotic years of the independence fight. It was drafted by and for the coup, who used it to affect what the general population learned about left- and right-wing fights during the tribunals. In drafting this law, the effect of Mazlum Doğan (March 21, 1982), and the 14 July hunger strike, which signaled that violence would not be solved through the coup, was important. The target of the law was misplaced and it was corrected with the Terrorism Law (1991), a significant activity in defining what terrorism is and what it is constituted from.
In 1924, with the onset of the Republic of Turkey, the nature of the state was defined. Instead of a citizenship policy based on an ethnicity (like Germany), Turkey defined the "Turkish" as the people who live within the borders of the state, with a common history and future. This was in defiance of the Ottoman definition of Turkish, which was based on ethnicity.
This definition disintegrated the ethnic Turks, as the word "Turk" gained the same conceptual structure as the term "peoples of Turkey." The state extended its activities to define a new language (Turkish) and a new way of writing (Latin-based) to enable communication between all its constituents. Ethnic Turks, who were trained in Arabic, had a hard time understanding and writing the new Turkish. However, these changes happened within the boundaries of "public places" and the state did not move into houses or organisations. Bosnians continued to teach their children their culture in the intimacy of their homes, and so did the Turks. When Bosnians and Turks came together in a public place, such as court, they would speak Turkish, a language both of their ancestors did not understand.
However, the Kurdish people were slow to change; they were behind the times in many ways. Ethnic groups in Turkey published and developed their own cultures, using their own resources. As a society, Kurdish internal problems began to be reflected in the larger system with the economic changes of the Kurds during the '60s and '70s. The state did not have extensive knowledge about this newly emerging problem, whose rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s was also mixed with Communist rhetoric. The state was organised not to interfere with anything that did not include its own activities (except that from 1981 to 1991, Kurdish was the only banned language in the history of the country). This is even reflected on the state's conceptions of the Kurdish language, and the state's goal of controlling the PKK's activities by controlling the dissemination of materials written in Kurdish.
"By contrast, the Kurds, cut off from the rest of the country by their remote location in the mountainous southeastern regions, divided along tribal lines, and economically dependent on local landed elite, remained largely unaffected by the new regime's policies of assimilation and modernization....The Kurdish language, which consists of several dialects, is related to Persian but heavily influenced by Arabic and Turkish as well. The official Turkish view is that Kurdish is not a distinct language but a border dialect. Kurdish was never a literary or administrative language under the Ottoman Empire; it was spoken mainly in the countryside, where it had little need to adapt itself to the realities of modern life." Dogu Ergil, Journal of Democracy 11(3) 122-135
