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“My Mother Tongue” (4): Arabic and Bosnian

According to the Ethnologue Turkey report, there were 400,000 native Arabic speakers in Turkey in 1992.

Middle East expert, journalist and writer Bereket Kar spoke to bianet on the occasion of the “International Mother Language Day," on 21 February.

In Turkey, teaching of Arabic only for religious purposes

Kar criticised the fact that the government was only interested in teaching Quran Arabic, and that anyone learning Arabic like that forgot it easily again. Furthermore, these courses represented a focus on religion rather than Arab culture.

Kar, who was an independent candidate in the general elections of 22 July, speaks, reads and writes Arabic, but had to learn it from friends: “I have also decided to teach my own children Arabic.”

Kar said that it was necessary to know Arabic in the city of Antakya, the province capital of Hatay, which borders on Syria.

Bosnian as "grandmother tongue"

Emine Özcan from bianet calls Bosnian not her mother tongue, but her “grandmother tongue”:

“My maternal grandmother expressed herself in Bosnian. My mother knows Bosnian but speaks Turkish; I don’t speak Bosnian.”

When people used to ask her, because of her light skin and eyes, where she was from, she used to say, “My grandmother was a migrant from Yugoslavia.”

A sense of loss

It was only at university that she realised that the Bosnian identity had not ended with her grandmother; food she was familiar with from home, songs and proverbs taught by her mother, brought home to her connections with her family’s past:

“Who knows, maybe my mother has regretted not being able to bring her own mother tongue into her home, and maybe my grandmother was sad about what she had to leave behind in Bosnia.”

However, in small ways, Özcan is developing her Bosnian with other young women, using at least some joking expressions.  (GG/TK/EZÖ/AG)