The Impact of Oral Language Features in Written Language in Cypriot Turkish

Abstract

This study is an attempt to describe the traces of spoken language in the written language in Cypriot Turkish in a longitudinal manner, starting from the early 1960s and proceeding to the present day. It should be noted that since 1974 the use of standard mainland Turkish on the island has become steadily more common due to the considerable increase in the number of settlements from Turkey. Nevertheless, the Cypriot Turkish dialect is still distinctively alive within the speech community. The first part of the article describes the features of the spoken language in Cypriot Turkish dialect. In the second part, examples are provided to show that the Cypriot Turkish dialect reveals itself not only in spoken language, but also in written language. The article also discusses the fact that the impact of oral language on written language is neither related to the formality of the context nor to one's schooling experience, that is, whether or not one has received formal education where “standard” variation is imposed. In order to base these observations on a firm ground, a number of informal and formal written language texts were analyzed and the impact of oral language on written language was investigated. Since the study has an ethnographic nature in terms of its scope and content, the author followed the principles of qualitative research techniques in data collection and analysis.