Each year on Sept. 26, Turkey proudly celebrates its annual Turkish Language Day with conferences and festive ceremonies around the country. This year was no exception, with many leading politicians issuing statements calling on the Turkish people to continue their efforts to cherish the Turkish sensibility of language for future generations. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkish is an “assurance of our people’s unity and solidarity.” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim hailed Turkish as a language that is among the most important and prevalent ones in the world, in terms of its geographical spread, the number of people who speak it and its richness. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, extensively praised the heritage Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s reforms produced for the Turkish language.

As a foreigner who learned Turkish as a fifth language, let me tell you that the Turkish mother tongue is quite difficult to learn — as an example, how about "Cekoslovakyalilastiramadiklarimizdanmissiniz" as one word — but also very beautiful and captivating. What is even more fascinating, though, is the political wars that are waged over the language.

One of the most important fronts in these wars is between the “old” and the “new” Turkish, and the ideologies that both symbolize in Turkish minds. The former reflects loyalty to the Ottoman past, while the latter refers to Ataturk’s so-called language revolution. Today, proponents and opponents of historical changes of the Turkish language continue clashing on the legacy left from the early Republican era.

The root of the problem is modernization. There was no strict language policy in the very diverse and multilingual Ottoman Empire. But in time a huge problem arose, as minorities — allowed to speak their own languages — could not understand Turkish people who spoke folk Turkish, perceived as a nomad language at the time. Moreover, the Ottoman language, a “higher” Turkish with strong influences of Persian (seen as the language of science and literature at the time) and Arabic (for its importance as the language of the Holy Quran), was spoken by the privileged ones in the palace. Something had to be changed. This first came with the Tanzimat (Reform) era that began in 1839. So by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, attempts for language simplification aimed at a “New Language” (Yeni Lisan) that everyone would understand were well in place.