Effects of the Turkish Language Reform on Person Perception. Working Papers of the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, No. 47.

As a result of the Turkish language reform, modern Turkish spans a range of styles from traditional to reformed, the former preferred by right-wing, traditionalist, and religious sectors of the population, the latter by left-wing, modernist, and secular sectors. Turkish students evaluate the two styles differently, and attribute attitudes and values to writers on the basis of their linguistic style. To define more precisely the means by which Turkish university students attribute social and political attitudes and values to individuals on the basis of the style of Turkish they use, a study was carried out in which matched pairs of paragraphs, differing only in use of traditional or reformed lexicon, were presented to students for rating of their putative authors on attitude and semantic differential scales. Results indicate that pairs of old and new terms cannot be considered synonymous in modern Turkish. Choice of terminology communicates important messages about the political and social ideology of the speaker; and these messages will be interpreted differently on the basis of the political and social ideology of the listener. (Author/AM)