SDLP 110: Cultural Post 4

[Constantinos Beauclair-Kolomtsas]

This cultural post was meant to discuss the targeted language's writing system. Coincidentally, I already covere that in the previous cultural post soI decided to go more in depth on the topic. Turkish is a a member of the Turkic language group, which is a language group spoken across Central Asia. The most common language of the Turkic family is Turkish. The Turkish language's writing system used to be the so-called Ottoman writing system until the 1920's when the Turkish Republic was formed from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Its leader Kemal Ataturk wanted to create a Western, secular state out of Turkey and as a result emphasized Western ideals. One step taken to achieve this was to replace the Ottoman wrting system and alphabet with the Latin alphabet. This drastic  change took time to fully implement but due to the mandate given to Kemal he was able to achieve the gargatuant task of changing the essense of an entire language. And so today Turkish uses Latin letters, which allows to export better since it uses the same alphabet as the most popular language in the world, English.