How good words turn bad

A look at pejoration in Turkish

During the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., it was perfectly acceptable to talk about black people as “negroes.” It no longer is. That’s not because the word itself is offensive (it’s simply derived from the Latin “nigrum,” meaning black.) It’s more that American society associated blackness with negative attributes, so the term describing it has worn out, and needed to be replaced. It’s now “black people” or “people of color.”

That process is called “pejoration.” Steven Pinker called it the “euphemism treadmill.” I’m generally not a fan of his work, but his description here is pretty good:

People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations, and so on. [...] Even the word ‘minority’ — the most neutral word label conceivable, referring only to relative numbers — was banned in 2001 by the San Diego City Council ... because it was deemed disparaging to nonwhites. ... The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people’s minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not for long. Names for minorities will continue to change as long as people have negative attitudes toward them. We will know that they have achieved mutual respect when the names stay put.

This kind of thing, of course, isn’t just happening in English. Turkish is also on the “euphemism treadmill” and it too, has been spinning faster and faster.

I thought it might be interesting to go through some of the words Turkish has been wearing out in recent decades.

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Yahudi

Let’s start at the top. The regular Turkish term for “Jew” or “Jewish” is “Yahudi.” It comes from the Hebrew term “Yehudi,” which means “of Judah.” Pretty simple. I’m pretty sure that was the term people used for a long time during the Ottoman Empire. My grandparents’ generation still used to use the term on its own. But “Yahudi” has been wearing out from rampant antisemitism, that is to say that most of the time when people hear the word “Yahudi” they think of some form of a political enemy.

So what has taken its place? I was a teenager when someone first warned me against using “Yahudi.” It was inappropriate, they said. The polite term was “Musevi” which roughly means “adherent of Moses.” This is the formal way to address Jewish people in Turkey. See, for example, the below tweets:

AK Party MP Özlem Zengin writes congratulates “Musevi citizens, and friends” on Passover. She’s retweeting the official presidential account that uses the same language.

So state bodies will use “Musevi,” especially if they’re talking about Jews who are citizens of Turkey. It would be considered inappropriate for them to use “Yahudi” here, but it does get lots of use when speaking of the “Jewish lobby” in the U.S., or Israeli settlers in the West Bank. In those cases, news outlets and organs of the state will use the term “Yahudi.” Regular people speaking amongst themselves will also always use “Yahudi.” Your Islamist ideologues will certainly be ranting against the “Yahudi.”

It’s just in those formal occasions, when the state - however Islamist - wants to be inclusive and nice, does it use the term “Musevi.”

Personally, I use “Yahudi” across the board, as do Jewish-Turkish outlets like the Şalom newspaper or Avlaremoz, which have published some engaging pieces on the pejoration of “Yahudi.”

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Zenci

Most languages have a lot of different words for black people, sometimes depending on the shade of their pigmentation. I think in the Ottoman empire, some black people were referred to as “Arap.” I’m not sure for the reasons of that, but it’s generally frowned upon these days.

In modern usage, the predominant term for black people is “zenci” which comes from the Persian zangī (زنگی). Nişanyan etymology guesses that this might come from a term denoting rust, but it’s not clear. Perhaps Persian-speaking readers can illuminate us on the matter. Either way, “zenci” doesn’t have a negative meaning on its own to the average Turkish speaker.

Yet the term is wearing out. Many now suggest that “zenci” is offensive and that the correct term is “siyahi,” derived from “siyah” also meaning black. I don’t know who came up with this, but there was definitely a lot of people tut-tutting when Obama became president in 2008.

I use “zenci,” which sometimes gets me awkward glances. I think “Yahudi” is still within safe distance, but “Zenci” has gone into deeper pejoration, so the rescue effort there is a bit edgy. Sometimes I’ll try to avoid the awkwardness by tiptoeing around the word, which makes things worse. It’s very frustrating, but I think I’ll keep at it.

As Turkey is developing into a destination of migrants, we now have a growing population of black people who are settled here. Unlike previous waves of African migrants, many of them are students or skilled workers, and they get involved in discussions about race. Below is a video where Oğuz Ergin, a professor at TOBB-ETÜ discusses the pejoration of “zenci” along with Talian Destin, an international student who now works with him. They argue that “zenci” can be offensive, but that it really depends on the context and intention of the speaker.

Ergin is upset at the pejoration of “zenci” because he feels that the country is importing American patterns that have obviously been shaped by the experience of chattle slavery. I think he has a point, but goes too far in white-washing the Turkish experience. People can be plenty racist without necessarily subscribing to Western forms of racism, but that again, is a different discussion.

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Kadın

The Turkish word for woman is “kadın,” as in the opposite of “erkek,” meaning “man” and “male.” At some point - I don’t know when - “kadın” came to be substituted with “bayan” in some settings. A “kadın” was a raw version of femininity. “Köylü kadın,” is a village woman, “temizlikçi kadın,” is a cleaning lady, and “hayat kadını,” literally meaning “a woman of life,” is a prostitute. An office worker, in contrast, was to be addressed as a “bayan.”

In traditional usage, a girl is a “kız” until she loses her virginity, at which point she becomes a “kadın.” The taboo on the term was the extension of male ascetic discipline. If a woman has “the knowledge,” she had either have ascended into holy motherhood or fallen into godless promiscuity. I suppose the mere mention of “kadın” evoked those thoughts, which wore out the term and made people reach for another one. If you’re a woman in a village, your sexual status mattered. If you were a teacher or office, your sexual life was your own. Hence “bayan,” until proven otherwise through sexual promiscuity.

The most infamous case of usage in recent memory is, as usual with these things, Erdoğan’s. It was during the Gezi park protests in 2013, a nation-wide movement against the AK Party government. When talking about a particular group of protestors climbing on police vehicles, Erdoğan said “I don’t know - whether a kız or kadın.” These women were no longer “bayan,” that right had been revoked from them. They were now subject to the archaic distinction. Erdoğan was also implying that the people protesting at Gezi park were living lives of sexual promiscuity and that this made them kind of wild and inherently unreasonable. It painted a picture of deranged Amazonians climbing all over public property. These women had come from the fringes of society, and had to be banished thence.

That’s usually Islamism’s response to feminists - a sexual force that’s out of control, and has to be put back into its place. That’s what “bayan” does. It is meant to be a buffer ahead of femininity, a kind of linguistic hijab. The word is derived from the word “bay,” the formal, European-style address for men, which is in turn derived from “bey” the traditional term for a landowning man. The feminine address is merely a modification of the male one, like Even being made of Adam’s rib.

Turkish usage isn’t nearly as circumspect in its treatment of masculinity. “Erkek” is adjective for anything male, from humans to power plugs. As a noun it denotes a boy or a man. I’d say it’s every bit as sexual as “kadın” but there isn’t even a whiff of taboo around it.

So in the last decade or so feminists started to take “kadın” back. If you work in an upscale Istanbul office and use the term “bayan” you’re likely to get scolded by coworkers. Feminist protests often have some kind of signage putting down “bayan” and championing “kadın.”

Not bayan, but Kadın!!!

You’ll lear “bayan” in places where right-wing norms reign supreme - at bus terminals, police stations, etc. I suspect things are shifting against it though. Feminism has been pretty successful at penetrating even Islamist circles, and there’s a concerted effort at taking back “kadın” from pejorative territory.

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Almancı

As you may know, Turkey has quite a large diaspora. According to state bodies, there are 5.5 million citizens of Turkey living in Western Europe. Many of them went as migrant workers starting in the 1960s. West Germany was still rebuilding at the time, and was by far the biggest destination.

The people who settled there were called “Almancı,” which is hard to translate. “Alman” means “German” and the -ci/-cı/-çi suffix denotes a state of belonging or adherence. This can be value-neutral. A banker is a “bankacı” and a person selling simit, a round pastry, is a “simitçi.” Somtimes though, the suffix can have a slightly negative connotation. I think this is especially the case with political terms. “Tayyipçi” is a somewhat negative way to describe a supporter of Tayyip Erdoğan, because it hints at a mindless loyalty to the man. “İslamcı,” “Atatürkcü” and “Türkçü” can be considered positive or negative depending on context. “Kürtçü,” for reasons that should be obvious by now, has a mostly negative connotation.

So “Almancı” (or “Alamancı”) is someone from Turkey who, by virtue of having moved to Germany, is an adherent of Germanness. More broadly, the term is used for Turks and Kurds in Western European countries in general, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, France, etc.

“Almancı” used to be fine back in the day. It described workers who had gone there and back, but were mostly unaltered. They were still of Turkey, they spoke in the same dialects as everyone else back home, could get along in the same shorthand. After a few generations though, things changed. Most “Almancı” were now born in Europe and only visited Turkey for vacation. Their speech and appearance is different, their cultural reference points have shifted.

Below, for example, is a sketch where a couple of Turkish teenagers are trying to seduce some girls over summer break, but their strange cousins from Germany arrive and screw things up:

Is there negativity inherent in the term? Maybe, if we think of cultural unorthodoxy as degeneration. These things are colored by nationalistic assumptions, so there’s a whiff of an accusation of disloyalty in “Almancı,” a sense that some has defected or debased themselves. They have cut and run, succumbed to the temptation of ditching Turkishness for the more advanced state of Germanness, and in the pathetic attempt, got stuck between the two. If Turkishness is a form, the state of being “Almancı” is a corruption of it, a Turkish-Germanness that’s neither one or the other. The stereotypical “Almancı” seems incapable of speaking either Turkish or German in its established forms, but impulsively switch between the two. His dress, social norms and economic realities have changed so much that he can no longer sync into Turkish society as seamlessly as the earlier generations of Almancı could, nor is he accepted among the Germans.

Here’s a clip where they ask people in Germany what they think of “Almancı,” and while some do give a straight-forward definition, others say that they resent the label.

I used to use “Almancı” up until recently. Its pejoration is based on assumptions that I don’t share, and I had a fondness for the term. I also spent chunks of my childhood in Germany and still speak German regularly, so as a bit of an honorary Almancı, I thought it was fine for me to use.

I had to give it up though. I had a few conversations where I came away worrying that I might have offended someone, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Maybe some people can pull off non-offensive use of “Almancı,” but I can’t be confident that I can. It just ends up being too confusing for everyone involved. I now resort to awkward substitutes like “Almanyalı Türk/Kürt” (a Turk/Kurd from Germany) or “Türkiye kökenli” (of roots in Turkey) depending on what seems more appropriate.

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That’s as many words as I’m going to do now. To get back to Steven Pinker’s point, pejoration is probably a very good way to observe shifts in social values. Turkish speakers these days clearly put a lot of emphasis on national homogenization, but there is also an active progressive element in the country that’s pushing and pulling against that.

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Note: I’m going to continue the series on Erbakan’s biography. It’s just that I’m still visiting relatives, and this is easier for me to write from here. I’ll be back to my regular writing schedule next week!