Turkish ‘Sun Language Theory

The ‘Sun Language Theory’ was part of the language reforms in Turkey. Its official proclamation took place at the Third Linguistic Congress held in İstanbul in August 1936. The assessments available in historiography of the Soviet contribution to the creation of the ‘Sun Language Theory’ and the Soviet reaction to its proclamation indicate the ideas of the Soviet scientist Nikolai Marr as the most important contribution to this theory. Also, there are conclusions that in the 1930s the Soviet Union supported the ‘Sun Language Theory’. However, the research presented in this article demonstrates that the ‘Sun Language Theory’ differed from Marr’s ‘doctrine’ in a number of fundamental points. The scale of the discrepancy between these two theories was almost equal to the scale of the similarity between them. The ‘Sun Language Theory’ was not supported at all in the USSR. Though Soviet scientists to a certain extent positively assessed the new research of Turkish linguists, but only until it turned out that these studies had gone too far. At the Third Linguistic Congress in 1936 and after it, Soviet scientists publicly criticized the ‘Sun Language Theory’.

Russian language · Soviet union · Turkish · Turkish republic · Historical Turkish Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Turkey's Politics and Society