Free Turkish Awakening by Alev Scott

the taxi driver and my boyfriend, although not as relaxed as abi . Hocam , likewise, is more a term of respect than a literal form of address. It is, significantly, not really applied to women, and the only time I have been addressed as hoca was when I was actually a teacher at the Bosphorus University. In Ankara, the capital city, hoca is often used, not because people arenecessarily conservative but because it is a student town. Students ironically call each other hoca ,‘teacher’, and it has spread and mingled with the traditional, Anatolian use of the term.
    Turkish is the linguistic equivalent of a crazy fruit salad, with Turkic roots, a great deal of Arabic vocabulary both ‘Turkified’ and lifted directly, many Persian words and quite a considerable body of French. These French words were transliterated to suit the Latinised form of Turkish that was introduced by Atatürk in 1928, in place of the Arabic-Persian script. Over the past century, certain words and modes of expression have come in and out of currency, reflecting shifts in Turkish society. Aside from my taxi driver impersonations, my mother was also shocked by the amount of Arabic vocabulary I use, words like maalesef (‘unfortunately’) or selam (a standard Arabic greeting) . Sağ ol (‘thank you’) is not an Arabic phrase but it is a good example of an old-fashioned expression now very much in vogue. Its direct French-Turkish counterpart – mersi – is now fairly rare, and only really used by people above the age of thirty or so, and of a relatively privileged background. My mother, her vocabulary frozen in time from when she left Turkey in the seventies, uses mersi not because it was particularly chic to do so, but because it was normal; only peasants said sağ ol at that time, she says. This expression, meaning literally ‘be healthy’, was associated, at least in my mother’s circles, with backward, rural Anatolians who had more in common with their Middle Eastern neighbours than the more Western-facing, self-styled ‘progressive’ Turks. The latter sprinkled their speech with the French that retained kudos as the former language of the late Ottoman noblesse and the formal language of banking andbureaucracy. Thus, a formerly civilised, urbane word has become slightly passé and pretentious, while Arabic equivalents are both populist and popular. This has a lot to do with the huge rural migration to cities that has been taking place over the last thirty years in particular, meaning that the divide between snooty city types and the rustic masses has largely been worn away, and the latter’s parlance has prevailed.
    The mass migration of the last few decades has had important social consequences in Turkey. There are many more young people in cities competing for jobs and spouses, more office-centred jobs as people move away from agricultural employment, and interesting clashes between the inherent machismo of Turkish society and attempts at sexual equality in the workplace as women struggle up through the viscous grime of ingrained patriarchy. There is also a big patchwork of people displaced by choice, as it were: about half a million people move to Istanbul alone every year, and many of them have come from the East or Black Sea regions.
    Turks are always interested in origins. Most big-city dwellers these days are originally from elsewhere, so people are always curious to place each other. The question which comes even before ‘What’s your name?’ is Memleketiniz neresi? – ‘Where is your hometown?’ While Turks are very patriotic on a pan-Turkish scale, they are also deeply devoted to the particular area where they were born, or where either parent was born. Finding out that a stranger comes from anywhere in a hundred-mile radius of one’s own hometown is a cause for huge celebration on first meeting. Any geographical connection, no matter how arbitrary, is something of a triumph in this enormous, scrambled country, and the