Identification of the Language Attitudes of the Turkish Cypriots towards Greek with Respect to Ethnic Identity

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the attitudes of the Turkish Cypriots towards Greek. The language attitudes scale, the reliability and validity of which were verified in the previous studies, was administered to the Turkish Cypriot university students and the data obtained were analyzed by the use of SPSS statistical software package. The responses given to the items in the five-point Likert type attitudes scale were interpreted after they had been analyzed in terms of scale, subscales, and items. Taking all of the arithmetic averages, the standard deviations, and the chi-square values into consideration, consistent results were obtained from the items and also from the scale and the subscales in the study. While the attitudes of the participants did not generally include anything much negative, it was determined that the sensitivity degrees of the participants varied much in the anchor items existing in the subscales. It was arrived at a view that the attitudes of the Turkish Cypriot university student participants towards Greek in the study were much more positive and rational than those of the attitudes of the Greek Cypriot university student participants towards Turkish in the previous studies conducted by the researchers.