Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Jan 29 2007
Turkish Culture Ministry to teach Turkish to the world
The Turkish Ministry of Culture has prepared a bill to establish
foundations for the teaching of the Turkish language and culture all
around the world. The ministry is prepared to build such foundations,
which they have modeled on the British Council.
Launching such a widespread project for the first time, the ministry
decided to name the foundation after the famous Turkish Sufi Yunus
Emre. The foundation will be established under the leadership of the
Ministry of Culture and Tourism and its managerial board will consist
of the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry, Turkish Radio and
Television (TRT), the Turkish Co-operation and Development Agency
(TİKA), the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodities Exchanges
(TOBB), along with representatives from Turkish universities, and
will take its place among the few such foundations in the world like
the Goethe Institute of Germany and the French Cultural Center of
France.
However, the Yunus Emre Foundation, which has been designed to better
teach the Turkish language — which is amongst the 10 most spoken
languages, with such ‘lingua franca’ as Chinese, English, Russian and
Arabic– and to promote the Turkish culture, will have a difference
since its goal will be to teach the Turkish language and culture not
only in developed countries but also in developing countries, unlike
others. The first institutes will be established in European
countries, the United States and the Turkic republics. Then the
organization will soon be launched in other predetermined countries.
The Yunus Emre Foundation is anticipated to be in 150 countries in a
short time.
The foundation will be supported by the general budget. Possessing a
characteristic different from TİKA, the Yunus Emre Foundation
will operate in the field of education and culture. Since TİKA
engages only in economic matters, it will fill the long-standing gap
of the Turkish language and culture teaching across the world. The
foundation will first exhibit and introduce the Turkish culture.
Priority will be language-teaching
The idea for such a foundation was inspired by a report, published by
the United Nations in 2006, which demonstrated that Turkish was a
language spoken by a very large and widespread Turkish population
from the Pacific coast of the Russian Federation to the Central Asia
and to the Caucasus, Anatolia, Thrace, and the Western and Central
Europe. Even though Turkish is among the 10 most spoken languages in
the world, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism found that Turkish was
acknowledged as an official language only in Turkey, Turkish Cyprus
and the city of Prizren in Kosovo, and the disproportionate balance
between the number of countries where it’s spoken and the number of
countries that recognize it as an official language prompted the
ministry to take a major step toward establishing a foundation to
make the Turkish language more prevalent, which will be the first
priority of the foundation over the cultural interchanges.
The research of the United Nations revealed that Turkish has 25
dialects, spoken in 25 different regions. An earlier research by the
UNESCO in 1980 indicated that the total number of people speaking
varieties of Turkish was 200 million. The number has increased to 210
million in a quarter century. A major difference of Turkish from
other world languages is that it is one of the most spoken languages
in the world with its so many varieties. Some of the varieties are as
follows:
The standard language spoken in Turkey, Gagauz Turkish, Azeri
Turkish, Turkmen Turkish, Crimean-Tatar Turkish, Karacay-Malkar
Turkish, Nogay Turkish, Kumluk Turkish, Kazan-Tatar Turkish, Baskurt
Turkish, Kazak Turkish, Uzbek Turkish, Uygur Turkish, Altay Turkish,
Hakas Turkish, Tuva Turkish, Saha (Yakut) Turkish and Cuvash Turkish.
Speaking Turkic languages
73 million in Turkey, nearly 25 million Iranians of Azeri descent,
23,6 million in Uzbekistan, 18 million in the autonomous Turkic
republics in the Russian Federation, Tatarstan, Baskyrdistan,
Cuvahstan, the autonomous Yakut-Saha republic, the autonomous
Dolgan-Mens region, Kabardin Balkar, Tuva, the autonomous
Crimean-Tatar republics, Hakasia, the autonomous Gorno-Altay region,
the autonomous Dagistan republic, the autonomous Karacay region, 17,5
million in East Turkistan (China), 15,9 million in Kazakhstan, 7,6
million in Azerbaijan, 5 million in Kyrgyzstan, 4,6 million in
Turkmenistan, 2,8 million in Tajikistan, 5 million in Afghanistan, 3
million in Iraq, 2,7 million in Germany, 1,5 million in Syria,
850,000 in Bulgaria, 400,000 in Georgia, 350,000 in Serbia and
Kosovo, 300,000 in Crimea, 200,000 in Moldova, 200,000 in Austria,
354,000 in Holland, 150,000 in Australia, 176,000 in France, 135,000
in Greece, 97,000 in Macedonia, 120,000 in England, 112,000 in
Belgium, 50,000 in Israel, 27,000 in the USA, 25,000 in Denmark,
16,000 in Romania, 10,000 in Canada, 7,500 in Switzerland.
Among the most influenced languages
Spoken by 210 million, Turkish is among the languages influenced most
by other languages. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism will give
priority to simplifying Turkish for the language teaching works to be
done in cooperation with the Turkish Language Association. A research
conducted by the association revealed that 14 percent of the words
used in Turkish are of foreign origin (14,816 of 104,481 words).
Turkey was influenced most by Arabic and Persian. The languages
influenced most by Turkish are Armenian and Greek. The number of the
Turkish words used in other languages is as follows:
3159 words in Armenian, 2643 in Greek, 2454 in Bulgarian, 2422 in
Albanian, 1801 in Arabic, 1576 in Russian, 1542 in Romanian, 1500 in
English, 1142 in Hungarian, 228 in Urdu, 213 in Chinese, 110 in
Finnish and 1369 in Persian.
29.01.2007
ERCAN YAVUZ ANKARA