Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, vol.1, no.56, pp.167-186, 2021 (Scopus)
This article is concerned with the issue of bilingualism and minority
societies. Obviously, due to the vastness of the topic, not all the cases worldwide can
be covered. Hence the study focused on the Turkish context. Namely, the study
examined the Kurdish minority group in dominant Turkish society and the related
aspects. In so doing, the paper is divided into two parts. The first part deals with what
bilingualism is. As discussed in the paper, some people benefit from the use of more
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than one language when they communicate with the people with different ethnic or
cultural backgrounds, yet the paper argues that the use of bilingualism also faces
difficulties and assimilation in the countries where the hegemonic ideologies and
cultures prohibit the use of more than one native language with fear of losing unity
and native language. Secondly, the paper examines the difficulties Kurdish people
face when they want to have Kurdish-specific names in a predominantly Turkish
society. Hence the paper analyses the controversy over Kurdish naming in Turkey
through a qualitative research design, in which semi-structured interviews with seven
participants were used. The results show that the participants had to go through many
hardships with their names written in Kurdish letters. Therefore, they have negatively
been influenced nearly in almost all aspects of their lives because of having names
that have got odd meanings or became meaningless at all in Turkish.
Keywords: Bilingualism, minority society, Kurdish language, naming, Kurdish
ethnicity