Dr. Nevra Lischewski: Multilingualism and Language Planning in the Period of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic
Online lecture organized by Orient Institute Istanbul: Language Policy in Turkey, Recent Perspectives
17.11.2021
The Ottoman Empire was a fundamentally multilingual society. In the course of the late Ottoman and early Republican period, certain policies, rules and practices were introduced in order to influence the linguistic situation and to establish the dominant language in the society, without a perspective for maintaining its linguistic diversity. In this talk Dr. Nevra Lischewski introduces a conceptual framework of language planning. In doing so she undertakes a detailed, long-term analysis of the linguistic situation, policies and practices of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey with the aim of explaining linguistic issues by addressing larger social and political matters and of evoking awareness of multilingualism and linguistic diversity.
Dr. Nevra Lischewski is lecturer of Ottoman and modern Turkish at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Munich. She studied linguistics at Ankara University and then worked as a Turkish language instructor at the Language Centre of Ankara University. In Germany, she continued to work as a Turkish language instructor at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies and the Language Centre of the University of Munich. She graduated with a Master's degree in Linguistics with minors in Turkish studies and intercultural communication at the University of Munich. She received her PhD in Turkology and linguistics at the University of Munich.
Her research interest as a linguist focuses on the social aspects of language. Hence, language is not an object that can be considered in isolation, but rather is a social practice that is inseparable from its social and historical context. She applies this view on language, which refers to the disciplines of sociolinguistic and linguistic ecology, in her PhD thesis "Sociolinguistic Profile and Language Planning of the Ottoman Empire between 1850–1950" (soon to be published by Harrassowitz under the title "From Multilingualism to Monolingualism").