Forbidden Attraction: Ottoman Armenians and the Turkish Language in the Age of Nationalism

ABSTRACT: This article begins the work of excavating the varied attitudes toward Turkish that existed among Ottoman Armenians in the nineteenth century. It seeks to correct a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between Ottoman Armenians and the Turkish language, to reframe Ottoman Armenians as agents in their use of Turkish, and to expose Turkish as something far more than a "language of the oppressor" for many Armenians in the empire. The article begins by offering an overview of Ottoman Armenian Turcophonia. It continues by examining three language attitudes that led bilingual Ottoman Armenian men in Istanbul to choose Turkish over Armenian in certain social contexts. These include the perception that (1) Turkish was the language of public life and prosperity; (2) that Turkish was the language of power, prestige and urban masculinity; and (3) that Turkish was a more fully developed and expressive language than Armenian. I argue that these attitudes sustained a preference for Turkish over Armenian, even as intellectuals were actively cultivating the Armenian language as an essential component of Armenian identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Historiographically, this article takes discussions of the use of Turkish among Ottoman Armenians into the unexplored realm of the spoken and advocates for using approaches from the field of historical sociolinguistics to study social dynamics within Ottoman language communities.