Language Reform in Turkey and Iran

Of all man's cultural badges, that of language is perhaps the most intimately felt and tenaciously defended. Even chauvinists who are prepared to concede under pressure that language, race, and culture are not the same thing—that their national ethnicity may be mixed, their religion imported, their culture synthetic to a degree—will still cling to the national language as the last bastion of irrational totemic pride. Hence, one of the most controversial features of the programs of westernization and modernization fostered by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran was that of state-sponsored language reform, characterized chiefly by attempts to “purify” Turkish and Persian of their centuries-old accretion of Arabic loanwords. A case study of this process also affords some insight into the differing attitudes to national social reforms in Turkey and in Iran, and among the respective regimes, intelligentsia, and masses, which might help to explain why on balance one “succeeded” while the other “failed.”