The Turkish Language Association is the official regulatory body of the Turkish language, founded on July 12, 1932 by the initiative of Atatürk and headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The Institution acts as the official authority on the language, contributes to linguistic research on Turkish and other Turkic languages, and is charged with publishing the official dictionary of the language, Güncel Türkçe Sözlük.
History
The institution was established on July 12, 1932, under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti by the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, by Samih Rıfat, Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın, Celâl Sahir Erozan and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, all prominent names in the literature of the period and members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The head specialist and Secretary General of the institution was the Turkish ArmenianlinguistAgop Dilaçar starting from 1934, who continued to work in the institution until his death in 1979. The institution's name was changed to Turkish Language Research Institute in 1934, and it became the Turkish Language Institution in 1936.
Functions
The institution heads academic linguistic research in Turkey into the Turkish language and its sister Turkic languages of Central Asia. It publishes Türkçe Sözlük, the official Turkish dictionary, and Yazım Kılavuzu, the Turkish writing guide, in addition to many other specialized dictionaries, linguistics books and several periodicals. During the 1930s, the Turkish Language Association led campaigns to replace the Arabic, Persian and Greek loanwords in the Turkish language. During the 3rd Congress the Sun Language Theory was presented according to which the Ural-Altaic, Indo-European and Semitic languages had their source in the Turkish language. And since Turkish was the source of all languages, loanwords could further on persist and french loanwords were adopted more frequently. Recently however, the attention of the institution has been turned towards the persistent infiltration of Turkish, like many other languages, with English words, as a result of the globalization process. Since the 1980s, TDK campaigns for the use of Turkish equivalents of these new English loanwords. It also has the task of coining such words from existing Turkish roots if no such equivalents exist, and actively promoting the adoption of these new coinages instead of their English equivalents in the daily lives of the Turkish population. Turkey currently doesn't have a legal framework to enforce by law the recommendations of TDK in public life. On the other hand, there is a bill that is in consideration in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey at the moment that would give TDK and the Ministries of Education and Culture the tools to enforce legally the labelling of Turkish equivalents of these words next to their foreign counterparts, particularly in the news media, advertising, and commercial communications. Several members of the TDK support the implementation of a pure Turkish for daily use.
Publications
The institution, in addition to maintaining Güncel Türkçe Sözlük has published more than 850 linguistics related books, mainly consisting of studies on Turkic languages, specialized dictionaries, philological books, and works of literature. TDK also publishes Türk Dili, a journal on Turkish literature, since 1951, Belleten, the annual journal on Turkic languages, since 1953, and Türk Dünyası, another periodical published twice a year on Turkish language and literature since 1996.
Vocabulary
The 2005 edition of Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 104,481 entries, of which about 86% are Turkish and 14% are of foreign origin. Among the most significant foreign contributors to Turkish vocabulary are Arabic, French, Persian, Italian, English, and Greek.
