Language and nationalism: A comparative study of language revival and reform in Hebrew and Turkish

This dissertation is a comparative historical study of the revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken language and the Turkish language reform. It traces the birth of linguistic nationalism back to its origins in both cases and attempts to explain the crystallization of this political ideology. Departing from the instrumentalist and deterministic approach to language, which is prevalent in the modernist theories of the study of nationalism, it seeks to underline the unique attitude toward national language in each case. The role of two individuals, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the Hebrew case and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the Turkish, are emphasized and their contribution to the success of revival and reform are highlighted. Institutional frameworks in the service of linguistic nationalism, such as language institutes and committees, had also played an important part in the making of a national language and usually became battle grounds, where different visions of national identity clashed with one another. Finally, this study compares the attempts to introduce the Latin alphabet into the writing of Hebrew and Turkish. It describes the struggle between the proponents of the old writing systems and the romanizers, and explains why romanization failed in the Hebrew case and succeeded in the Turkish. In this sense, this comparative study aims at contributing not only to our understanding of linguistic nationalism in the cases of Hebrew and Turkish, but also to the field of nationalism in general.