Turkey's linguists fight global trend

ANKARA, Aug 19 (Reuters) Challenged to find Turkish equivalents for ''metrosexual'' to ''mortgage'', dozens of academics comb ancient and modern texts to coin new words which might save the Turkish language from foreign tongues.

Launched by modern Turkey's revolutionary founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and charged with excising Arabic and Persian words from the language, the Turkish Language Institute now focuses on keeping the influence of English at bay.

Its next project is to show that linguistic globalisation is not a one-way process with a new dictionary due out this year showing 12,000 Turkish words have found their way into other languages.

It is a far cry from the days when the institute backed a theory that said Turkish was the mother of all tongues and the origin of names from Amazon to Niagara, the so-called Sun-Language Theory which Ataturk himself endorsed.

But the Ankara-based institute says it is sticking to the founding principle of giving Turkish its rightful standing among world languages.

''We think showing Turkish's assets and the contribution Turkish has made to world languages is an important scientific study,'' Chairman Professor Sukru Akalin told Reuters in an interview.

English-speakers might be surprised to learn that words such as ''yoghurt'' and ''kiosk'' have a Turkish origin while thousands of Turkish words have made their way into Balkan languages under the influence of the vast Ottoman Empire.

The institute -- founded as part of Ataturk's sweeping reforms after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire -- is also trying to extend the reach of Turkish by making it a lingua franca in Central Asian countries whose languages are related, such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

THOUSANDS OF NEW WORDS Turkey is not alone in having a language institute: the 400-year-old Academie Francaise lists linguistic purity as part of its mission while its counterpart in Iceland churns out pure Icelandic neologisms to keep English at bay.

Most of the Turkish institute's new words cover technical and scientific terms and Akalin says it currently produces at least 3,000-4,000 Turkish terms a year.

Among the latest day-to-day words it has had to translate is mortgage, as the concept was introduced in Turkey last year.

Researchers look for words from pre-Ottoman Anatolia -- before Persian and Arabic became influential -- and also at regional dialects and Central Asian Turkic languages.

The new word for mortgage, ''tutsat'' is a mixture of ''sell'' and a 14th century Anatolian word for collateral, Akalin said.

''Using words with foreign roots has an important negative effect on the language,'' said Akalin, explaining the havoc English words can play on Turkish's regular and phonetic spelling system.

He says his campaign against foreign words aims to make the language less elitist, just as the idea behind Ataturk's reform was to remove the difference between popular Turkish and the complex Arabic- and Persian-influenced language of court.

Ataturk's reform also replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one.

''Otherwise there are words only the elite can understand ...

It's an enlightenment movement.'' New words have mixed success: the state broadcaster and news agency tend to adopt them but private media outlets have a more mixed response. Ordinary Turks laugh at some neologisms.

Akalin tracks their success through search engines on the net -- another concept for which the institute has coined a term.

''Tutsat'' has caught on, but ''mortgage'' gets far more hits.

REUTERS RKM KN1616