|
[The cover of "Osmanlıca Bilenlere Dört Günde Ermenice Okumanın Usulü," an 1892 book teaching Armeno-Turkish. Image via Tozsuz Evrak.] |
There we sat, the proverbial Turk and Armenian, at neighboring tables in a university student center in New Jersey. My back to his, I drew my eyes out of the book I was reading to concentrate on the voice behind me. The gliding vowels of Turkish always sound familiar in the split second it takes for my brain to mark the language as unknown. As the man shouted into his cellphone, unaware of the aspiring eavesdropper nearby, a surge of recognition startled me each time I managed to catch a hiç or a hemen. These words were, after all, part of my language too.
That was the microcosmic encounter between two nations notoriously divided: a non-conversation through a handful of words that belong to us both. It was an encounter rooted in another time, another world away—a time before ethno-linguistic nationalism led Armenians and Turks to retreat into their languages and fortify them against each other, a time before the Turkish people held exclusive rights to the Turkish language, and a time before the Armenian people felt a visceral unease towards most things Turkish.
This scene recalls the intimate relationship that Ottoman Armenians once had with the Turkish language. Although this relationship grew strained nearly a century ago when most of the community was pushed into the diaspora, among many of the descendants of this community there remains a quiet, reticent affection for the language that still echoes today in far-flung corners of the Armenian diaspora.
Turkish: A Language of the Ottoman Armenians
How can the relationship between a people and their imperial language be framed as a transnational, multigenerational love affair in good faith? Other imperial contexts point to the striking implausibility of this scenario. The tendency of imperial powers to use language to sink their claws deeper into the minds of the colonized, strip them of their cultural identities, and tighten their grip on the territory they aim to pillage might prompt a raised eyebrow at the metaphor. But there is a distinction to be made between an Algerian’s relationship to French, an Indian’s relationship to English, and an Ottoman Armenian’s relationship to Turkish.