as a nation is a matter of conjecture. On occasion, and particularly during periods of Greek-Turkish tension, the Greeks have openly demonstrated their patriotism to Athens. Armenians Like the Greeks, Turkey's 50,000 Armenians are almost exclusively residents of Istanbul. Armenians are fiercely defensive of their Gregorian religion, their language (which is Indo-European with similarities to Indo-Iranian and Greek), and their ethnic identity. These characteristics plus their progressiveness and industry are the reasons they have been made the target of persecution for centuries. The Armenians in Istanbul are second in wealth only to the Greeks of that city. Like the Greeks, they utilize their urban talents as merchants, bankers, and moneylenders and support their own newspapers and schools. They cling to their identity as Armenians and maintain ties with their compatriots throughout the Middle East and Soviet Armenia. They refuse to identify with the Turkish Republic and choose instead to perpetuate their ethnic identity, but the Armenians, unlike the Greeks, have no independent nation to look to as a source of nationalistic pride. Since the establishment of an independent Armenian state within Turkish borders is no longer considered a possibility by even the most optimistic Armenians, many have looked to Soviet Armenia as a source of pride and as their true homeland. Attitudes Toward Moslem Minorities To this Turkish community-at-large, the social scale has two dimensions; the Kurds are near the top of one and the bottom of the other. When evaluated by Western-inspired criteria, as is often the case in the new Turkey, the Kurds are perceived as unmannered, rude, backward illiterates; they are placed with the Arabs on the bottom of the social ladder. When the Turks seek a source of unique self-identity, however, they point to the romanticized image of the noble, manly, dedicated warriors, their own ancestors and the Kurds. Thus, the Kurds stand near the top. On the one hand, Kurds are romantically admired; on the other, they suffer many social disabilities and are often viewed with cautious suspicion. Turkish-Arab relations are mutually antagonistic for a variety of reasons, some involving staid, stereotyped character judgments and others revolving around international politics, past and present (see ch. 3, Historical Setting). LANGUAGE Over 90 percent of the population speak Turkish as their primary language. Less than 6 percent speak Kurdish as a mothertongue, and only about 1 percent speak Arabic originally. Turkish is a member of the Turko-Tatar language family, which belongs to the Ural-Altaic stock. It is remotely related to Finnish and Hungarian as well as to an array of languages across Siberia. Turkish has at different times and places been written in Syriac, Tibetan, Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew characters as well as the Arabic script used until 1928. The most recent conspicuous fact about Turkish is its emergence in the 19th century as the primary prestige language of the nation. Under the Empire, a cosmopolitan elite spoke a mixture of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian and despised the Turkish speech of the Anatolian peasantry as an uncivilized vernacular. Language reform started in the 19th century and culminated with leaders of the Republic attempting to construct a national unity based upon conscious pride in a heritage of Turkish language and culture. The vernacular of the Istanbuli Turks was selected as the ideal, and a purification of the language was begun by eliminating all foreign words from the Turkish vocabulary. During the course of this reform, the Western form of the Arabic numerals was adopted (1928); the Latin alphabet was substituted for the Arabic (1928); Arabic and Persian were dropped from the school curriculum (1929); the semiofficial Linguistic Society was formed to direct the reform (1932); the call to prayer was changed from Arabic to Turkish (1932) and back again to Arabic (1950); the 1924 Constitution was translated into the new Turkish (1945); and then the original language was readopted (1952). This language reform has been continued to the present day. Structured Turkish language training is mandatory in primary schools. Almost all minorities, except perhaps the Kurds, are by necessity multilingual. Thus, although Greeks learn and prefer Greek as their mother-tongue, a good deal of their business life is spent speaking Turkish. The same is true for Jews and Armenians but less so for Arabs, who are more geographically isolated from the Turkish majority. Members of all minority groups, however, prefer their native tongue when associating with their own group. Turkish is the primary language of business, society, the cinema, the press, and other communication forms. Greek, Armenian, and some Kurd newspapers are published, but they carry negligible weight in the country's overall communication system. Non-Turkish Languages The primary non-Turkish languages spoken in Turkey are Kurdish and Arabic, which are the primary languages of no more than 7 percent of the population. Other minority languages (Greek, Armenian, Caucasian, Ladino, Yiddish, and others) are the first languages of only 1 percent of the population. For the Moslem minorities, Islam provides a strong tie with the Turkish majority. As Turkish becomes the main language of increasing numbers of young people in the schools, students tend more and more to become permanently absorbed into the majority. Non-Moslems lack this religious connection, and their assimilation is not as complete because it depends solely upon the learning of Turkish in schools. Turkish has, however, replaced French, German, and English as the second language of the educated minorities. Kurdish is the native language of the 1.5 million Kurds in southeastern Turkey, about 5.8 percent of the entire population of the country in 1960. It is an Indo-European language most closely related to Persian and is spoken in at least three mutually intelligible dialects, of which Kermanji is the principal one in Turkey. Twentieth-century Kurdish contains evidence of a good deal of influence from Turkish, Arabic, and Armenian. The Arabic vernacular spoken in Turkey differs little, if any, from the Arabic of northern Syria. This is not at all surprising since most of the speakers are immigrants from Syria, and their descendants live in the Turkish provinces bordering Syria and are in almost daily contact with Syrian Arabs. There are three related but mutually unintelligible Caucasian languages spoken in Turkey: Circassian, Georgian, and Laz. The term Caucasian is used as a catchall for those languages spoken in the Caucasus area that cannot be identified with either IndoEuropean or Turkic language families. No clear relationship between the various Caucasian languages and others has been demonstrated. Spanish-derived Ladino and German-derived Yiddish are spoken by the Jews in Turkey. The other two minority languages are Greek and Armenian, which are spoken by approximately 110,000 people in Turkey as primary languages. They are identical to the languages spoken in present-day Greece and Soviet Armenia. There is a difference between the spoken and the classical forms of these languages, the latter being generally unintelligible to mid-1968 speakers of the same languages. CHAPTER 6 SOCIAL STRUCTURE There are several primary structural distinctions involved in the Turkish world which must be understood before embarking on a description of any one of them. The first, differences between urban and rural life, in Turkey are paramount. Approximately 70 percent of the people are dispersed in more than 40,000 villages and small towns, the average village containing only about 100 households and 600 people. The social organization of these people is, in most ways, alien to full participation in a modern state. But to say that Turkey is two worlds-one rural and one urban—is to overstate and oversimplify the situation. The Turkish peasant has felt many of the changes instigated from the upper echelons of the government; changes in church and state, in traditional dress, names, and education, have all required a response of some sort from the rural residents. Outside officials and their orders reach the villages in an ever-increasing stream, and the villagers more frequently visit towns and cities for business, work, entertainment, and trade. Most often, urbanites and rural residents have different concerns, loyalties, and organizational principles around which they order their existence. The problems encountered by the first urban-educated teachers who were sent to the villages, and who were mostly unwilling, indeed unable to adjust to village life because of these great cultural differences, bear witness to the urban-rural distinction. The second important distinction should be made within the category of rural social structure. There are three essentially different rural configurations: the central, or Anatolian, villages; the coastal villages which exhibit more of a Western-orientation, with less stable traditional rural patterns; and the southeastern villages, inhabited by descendants of various nomadic Arabic and Kurdish tribes, and still interspersed with seminomadic Kurds. These distinctions imply the existence of difference sets of structures-parallel structures-in Turkey. Each village type has its own forms of social structure-patterned sets of relations between various elements-which in turn differ from the primary forms operative in urban areas. There is, of course, interaction D between structural units within each village or type of village, but little interaction between types of villages on the one hand, and between urban and rural structures on the other. Middle-sized towns are the most frequent nonvillage contact for village residents. These towns range from settlements formed mainly around the institutions of the market place to somewhat larger population centers which offer a variety of goods, services, and facilities. In both types, the rural peasant participates in the economic structure of the town, and in this process makes his contribution to the national economic pattern, through the exchange of goods and services. In the larger settlements, serving important political functions as well as economic, the peasant is linked with the outside Turkish scene in the realm of socio-political relations. Running through these communities-urban, town, and the three types of villages-is a concept of the elite which serves to bind the entire society together. Historically, there has been an underprivileged bottom social stratum in Turkish society which has failed to achieve full acceptance in the social universe. Such a division is not based fundamentally on ethnicity or concepts of rural versus urban, but rather on the social principle of a privileged stratum accepted by all segments of the society. Thus despite the basic parallelism of Turkish society, urban and rural, for instance, this privileged group in both communities may be identified as a common social phenomenon, accepted as a part of the whole social system by the nonelites. VILLAGES Villagers live within a national society in which some individuals are far wealthier and far more educated than the average peasant. This wealthy, educated segment of the population lives almost exclusively in towns and cities. Although villages are dependent on the national economy and formally subordinate to the political administration of both local and national government, yet village residents have comparatively few dealings with those who determine policy. Moreover, most urban residents know little about village life, and misconceptions do exist. Anatolian The basic structure of Anatolian village life is described in the word aile, which means "family" in standard Turkish and refers to a conceptual group of co-residents within a household, lineage, village, or nomadic band. It functions as the primary element in village society and the nucleus of concerted group action. At different times, depending on circumstances, the aile may include a |