This article explores the link between language policies and nationbuilding by focusing on the Turkish case during the early Republican period . As opposed to conceptualising nation builders as seamlessly and strategically forming a nation out of the remnants of an empire, this article emphasises the complex and, at times, ambiguous nature of the nation-building process using Turkey as a case study. The article is also critical of ethno-symbolic accounts of nations and nation formation that tend to emphasise the cultural at the expense of the political sphere. Instead, by looking at the process and content of the formulation of language policies, this study demonstrates how culture was highly politicised during the formative period of the Turkish nation.

Following World War I, the Allied Powers signed Minority Treaties with a number of Central and Eastern European states. These treaties delineated the status of religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities in their respective countries. Turkey would be one of the last states that sat down to the negotiation table with the Allied Powers. In the Turkish case, the Lausanne Treaty would be the defining document which set out a series of rights and freedoms for the non-Muslim minorities in the newly created nation. The present article explores how and why the non-Muslim minorities were situated in the fringes of the new nation. In doing so, the article highlights the content of the discussions in the Lausanne Conference and in the Turkish Grand National Assembly with an emphasis on the position of the Turkish political elite.

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines how Armenian citizens of Turkey employ names and naming strategies in their everyday life in order to navigate a nationalist social landscape. Studies of nationalist politics in everyday life have been particularly successful in demonstrating how nationalism is experienced and reproduced through the consumption of national symbols and rituals. What remains relatively glossed over in these accounts are the individuals’ constant and dynamic engagements with nationalist politics not only through national symbols and rituals but also through everyday social practices with fellow citizens. The present study seeks to capture and analyze this latter, relatively understudied, aspect. In doing so, the discussion reveals how individuals use different name strategies in order to fend off shame and humiliation as well as inhibit threats to status advancement. Overall, the following narrative moves beyond a demonstration of the functionality of nationalism as a source of unity and solidarity. Instead, it reveals the ways in which nationalist politics and minorities’ responses align, diverge and/or conflict on the ground.