Turkish and Other Languages in Turkey Kutlay Yagmur Describing the sociolinguistic situation in the Republic of Turkey is not an easy enterprise. The reasons are manifold, but mainly the limited availability of academic resources and the non-availability of up-to-date information on ethnic groups in Turkey make the task hard. For a thorough understanding of the present sociolinguistic situation, it is necessary to provide a short account of Ottoman linguistic practices and the Turkish language reform. There will be three sections focusing on the sociolinguistic context, demographic characteristics, and the present status of languages in education. In the first section, a brief account of the sociolinguistic situation during the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish language reform as part of a modernization movement is documented. In the second section, present demographic data of language groups in Turkey are examined. In the final section, language education practices and the status of minority languages in education are discussed. THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC SITUATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE The account of Turkish language development throughout history is an intriguing one. The great empires of recent times, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, and the Spanish, British, French, Portuguese and Dutch colonies in other continents, have left their languages behind to a certain extent. However, the Turkish language was not always left in most of the countries the Ottomans ruled for 600 years. The reasons are numerous, but the political and ideological formation of the Ottoman Empire turns out to be the main reason (for a comprehensive account see Akin, 1988 and Lewis, 1974). With the spread of Islam among the Turks from the 10 th century onward, the Turkish language came under the heavy influence of Arabic and Persian cultures (contact with Persian dates back to much earlier times). Starting from the Seljuki period in the 10 th century, Arabic was used for religious education, Persian for literature, and Turkish for daily communication. During the reign of the Ottoman Empire, the linguistic situation became even more complex, and the ratio of original Turkish within the Arabic-Persian dominated Ottoman language was reduced to a minimum. As a result, a synthetic language called Osmanlıca emerged. Osmanlıca was a synthetic blend of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, with linguistic features of each. This synthetic language was not only loaded with many Arabic and Persian words, but also with grammatical rules derived from these three languages. As a consequence, there were three types of rules for inflection, derivation, suffixation, compounding, and concord (Bakan, 1986). Osmanlıca became the high-status language of religion, culture, and administration. As a literary language, it was almost unintelligible to common people. Only the elite of the Empire spoke and mostly wrote this synthetic language. The Turkish language and the people who spoke it were undervalued and even looked down upon by the administrative classes. Osmanlıca became increasingly the language of culture, art, science, and technology in the Ottoman Empire. This linguistic situation is intriguingly similar to the linguistic climate in South Africa documented by Alexander (1999), with one very interesting difference. According to Ngugi (1994, cited in Alexander 1999: 39), in the African continent, the colonizing powers systematically undervalued the indigenous