THE ALPHABET ISSUE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND REFORMS PARALLEL TO TURKEY AIMING TO SIMPLIFY THE BOSNIAN WRITTEN LANGUAGE Cover Image

BOSNA HERSEK’TE ALFABE MESELESİ VE BOŞNAK YAZI DİLİNİN SADELEŞTİRİLMESİNE YÖNELİK TÜRKİYE İLE PARALEL OLARAK YAPILAN REFORM ÇALIŞMALARI
THE ALPHABET ISSUE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND REFORMS PARALLEL TO TURKEY AIMING TO SIMPLIFY THE BOSNIAN WRITTEN LANGUAGE

Author(s): Ömer Aksoy
Subject(s): South Slavic Languages, The Ottoman Empire
Published by: Trakya Üniversitesi Balkan Araştırma Enstitüsü
Keywords: Tanzimat; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Turkey, Turkish; Bosnian; reform;simplification;

Summary/Abstract: Along with the Tanzimat, the restructuring of the language within the context of the Westernization issue and the simplification of it to make people able to understand in every way, is considered as one of the most important cultural issues of Turkish intellectuals.The idea of simplification of the Turkish language and its easier accession to the public within the scope of the New Language Movement initiated by the Genç Kalemler Magazine and those intellectuals gathered around this journal will turn into nationalist ideas in the Ottoman political life and ideas for the language unity and the use of the a common Turkish alphabet for those peoples speaking the same language. Ideas of simplification of the written language in the Tanzimat period were discussed by Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, and various studies were conducted on this subject.The oral culture products, which were recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a way similar to Ziya Gökalp's through the people principle, led the intellectuals to determine the framework of Bosnian language.The Bosnian intellectuals worked on the reforming of the text language and the Arabic alphabet in order to simplify the Bosnian text language used by the Bosnian people and to preserve the spiritual unity with the Turkish society through the oral culture products written during the period of Austrian-Hungarian rule.This article aims to reveal and provide information about similar reform efforts that enable Bosnians to focus on oral culture in order to simplify language as an element of ethnic belonging and not to break spiritual bond with the geographies that have moral ties in terms of Turkish and Bosniak intellectuals in line with the Westernization objectives.

  • Issue Year: 7/2018
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 249-272
  • Page Count: 24
  • Language: Turkish