Local Linguistic Ideologies and Iraqi Turkmens' Experience of Forced Migration to Turkey: a Folk Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

With the current situation of the political turmoil in Northern Iraq, Turkey has been a natural destination country for thousands of refugees escaping the war, including the Iraqi Turkmens. Being native speakers of Turkmen-Turkish and Arabic, Iraqi Turkmen refugees go through confrontations about linguistic ideologies with the local Turkish community on a daily basis. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data of naturally occurring interactions from social gatherings of local Turkish women with their Iraqi Turkmen neighbors, the present paper analyzes the dialogical processes through which these women construct and negotiate their identities and social relations from the lens of a range of linguistic ideologies. The findings suggest that while the Iraqi Turkmen participants' skillful interactional moves allow them to reframe their relationship with the local women, Turkish nationalism blended with Ottoman patriotism and Sunni-Islamic conservativism, which lay the foundation of the women's linguistic beliefs and judgments, complicates the process of their attempt for recognition.