Abstract
TWO NATIONALIZATION EXAMPLES: PURE LANGUAGE PROJECT OF GREEKS “KATHAREVUSA” AND THE ATTEMPT OF TURKS “ÖZTÜRKÇE”
Modernization necessarily brought the World to the brink of nationalization. While this situation has brought extinction for some nations, it has created a new construction process for some nations through nation identity. Greeks and Turks as the nations in the second group are seen in which to exhibit similiar practices. As the nation that built the “Greek” national identity and experienced modernization from outside the West nearly a hundred years before the Turks, the Greeks built a language named “katharevusa” which the archaic words came to the fore and created a literary canon composed of Works written from this language. A century later, surprisingly, there was an attempt to “Öztürkçe”, which emphasized the archaic period of Turkish, similarly with them, to build a national identity on the road to nationalization. Based on the fact that both nations do not define themselves as the West, in fact, Westerns also define them as the East, and, they collide with the civilization and culture in which they try to resemble as well, in this article, it was emphasized why the similarity between these experiences may have been caused and some socio-cultural and political reasons behind this practice.
Keywords
Öztürkçe, Katharevusa, national language, national identity, nationalization
