Turkish Surnames and Their Critics Since 1934

Abstract

This chapter utilizes, literary sources, legal booklets, news media, and other sources to examine how the legacy of the Surname Law has unfolded since the 1930s. From the late 1940s onwards, the law’s Turkist critics denounced it for having alienated Turks from their authentic naming culture. A particularly vocal intellectual embodying these views, Ziyaeddin Fahri Fındıkoğlu (1901–1974), a sociologist, folklorist, and legal scholar, published a series of articles criticizing the law and its incompatibility with the original intentions of Ziya Gökalp. Meanwhile, legal booklets by lawyers indicate that many citizens applied to courts to change family names inadvertently taken or assigned in the 1930s. By the 1980s and 90s, names and language were also the focus of the two movements that challenged the established order: Islamists and Kurds. In the 1980s, an encyclopedia by an Islamist group claimed that the law on to abolish titles and language reform targeted Islam, while newspapers also published accounts of Kurdish families having difficulty registering Kurdish names for their children. Today, the names that citizens can be called continue to be a site where Turkish citizens make claims about their history and ethnicity and where the state articulates the limits of its inclusivity.