This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the Kurdish region, its peoples and its historic experience in the Turkish Republic since the 1920s. It describes the multiple peoples of the region, including Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Yezidis and Syriacs before discussing its linguistic heterogeneity. It proceeds to outline the emergence of Kurdish Nationalism in the early twentieth century, and how Kurdish political forces were confronted by the Turkish Nationalism of the early Republic. It discusses the Kurdish rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s and the violent state reaction. It finishes by describing some of the socio-economic and political transformations which changed the country in the 1940s and 1950s such as industrialisation and the installation of a form of electoral democracy. It explains how the unintended consequences of the state presence in Kurdistan led to the formation of an educated class of young Kurds with the social capital required to lead a Kurdish cultural and political rival from the 1950s.

“This chapter analyses the socio-economic and political structures and transformations of the Kurdish people from the Ottoman era through to the modern Turkish Republic, arguing that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Kurdish question and the de-development of the predominantly Kurdish domains. Adopting a longue-durée framework it combines key theoretical insights of the fields of critical political economy, development studies, international relations and comparative politics to develop an original account of the Kurds, ESA and Turkey’s Kurdish question. It delineates and examines the socio-economic and political developments, structures and transformations in ESA from 1514 to 2014. These transformations are then critically compared with those of other domains within the context of the larger geopolitical area of which these territories have been a part over the course of these five centuries. Resultantly, the chapter devises a novel periodization for the socio-economic history of ESA based on three distinct periods: development, underdevelopment and de-development, and posits that the relationship between these domains and the Turkish state is characterized by a unique socio-economic process: de-development.”