Science, apparently, is apolitical. Mathematics, we are told, is a universal language. The disciplines and branches of study that we hold to be based upon discoverable, observable fact, we are led to believe, are objective and agnostic when it comes to ideology. The Enlightenment, positivism and empiricism have shaped our minds to view the laws of nature as culture-free, impervious to zeitgeists and zealots. Fallibility is a factor of our own misconceptions and misunderstandings. Perhaps more than ever, these maxims are being put to the test in contemporary discourse. Disputes over climate science, gender and genetics have led to heated debates about the nexus of science, politics and advocacy. This is especially true given various governments’ penchant for presenting alternative facts or theories to counter dominant positions within the scientific community. Politics, apparently, is ruining scientific achievement.
Yet the belief in a dividing wall between science and politics is far from a universally held truth. Contemporary writers have made explicit the instrumentalization of science in the Cold War, whether as a component of the Arms Race or as part of a broader competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.Footnote 1 But throughout the twentieth century, intellectuals have also pointed to how the bases of science themselves are intricately linked to our worldview, making the defence of a particular scientific epistemology, or the metadiscipline as a whole, an intensely political argument.Footnote 2 The same is true of the social sciences, where discussions on the attainability, and desirability, of objectivity are perhaps more commonplace than in the pure or physical sciences.Footnote 3 The classification of languages, and the study of their dialects, is no stranger to such dynamics.
In this paper, I explore one particular instance of an ideological seismic shift in the realm of linguistic classification. By reviewing the writings of the Crimean Tatar scholar and pedagogue Bekir Çobanzade, I bring together the components of a narrative about the influence of Soviet ideology, and ideological dogmatism, on the categorization of Turkic lects. I show that the rising tide of Stalinist authoritarianism pushed Çobanzade's conceptualization of the Turkic linguistic space from traditional Turkic understandings of linguistic relation towards a Marxist-Leninist paradigm of the social division of languages.
In order to understand better Çobanzade's approach to linguistic knowledge, I have divided this investigation into three unequal parts. The first is a brief biography, followed by a section that functions as an overview of the author's linguistic praxis. This second part highlights his switching between dialects and languages, and helps us to piece together his view of the socio-political implications of language. The third component reviews a body of writing that addresses specifically Çobanzade's views of the Turkic lects, their division, and their ultimate development into national languages. It is my hope that the first two parts complement the third by contextualizing the importance of language for Çobanzade, and his own flexibility with respect to its uses.
Before proceeding with this plan, however, I think it appropriate to pause here for a brief look at this study's positionality. The fields of Turkic intellectual history and Turkic linguistics do find brief spots of overlap, but these are often few and far between. Most works, including this one, prefer to examine the writings of Turkic intellectuals regarding language from the point of view of the history of ideas, rather than that of linguistics. Şemseddin Sami, also known as Sami Frashëri, for example, has been a particularly rich source for those who explore the topic from an Ottoman angle. Researchers, both Albanian and Turkish, have delved into his writings in order to explore their impact on ideas about Turkish grammar and Turkic linguistic relations, but not as purely linguistic studies of his theories.Footnote 4 This preference for historiography over linguistics is even more pronounced when it comes to the science of the Turkish language as practised in 1930s Turkey, where the Sun-Language Theory (SLT) held sway. This episode has produced a relatively rich literature, owing in part to both the flawed nature of the SLT and the eccentricity of those who espoused it.Footnote 5
When it comes to Soviet Turkic thinkers of the 1920s and ’30s, the field is much sparser; at least in terms of English-language literature. Çobanzade himself has largely escaped an in-depth review by anglophone authors, with the exception of a piece by Henryk Jankowski about his time in Budapest.Footnote 6 The Turkish scholar Abdullah Battal Taymas also took an interest in the young Crimean, producing one work about his educational achievements in Hungary,Footnote 7 and another about his poetry.Footnote 8 Inside the USSR, it is Ashnin whom we can thank for a biographical piece in Narody Azii i Afriki,Footnote 9 which was followed up by a paper on our subject's court case in a Crimean Tatar journal in 1998.Footnote 10 With the fall of the Soviet Union, more primary source material became available, and so too did a space emerge in which more scholars could turn a critical eye to Çobanzade. Tagirzade and Guliev wrote a short biographical sketch about him in 1990,Footnote 11 but it was Nagaiev who probably provided the most comprehensive overview of his life and scholarship, albeit without a specific focus on his linguistic work.Footnote 12
In the twenty-first century, interest in Bekir Çobanzade's life and works has blossomed in both Turkey and the former Soviet Union, especially in Azerbaijan and Ukraine. To the south of the Black Sea, Elnur Ağayev has provided us with a comprehensive look at Çobanzade's activities in bureaucratic structures in Azerbaijan,Footnote 13 while Şimşir has spent considerable amounts of time exploring his denunciation and execution in the Great Terror.Footnote 14 It is in the Caucasus, however, where his writings themselves come under considerable amounts of scrutiny.
In 2013, a large conference took place in Baku that focused on the life, work, and legacy of this noted Turkologist. Among the dozens of papers that were presented, three in particular are of interest to the current study. Guseynova and Qǝmbǝrova presented their respective research on Çobanzade's scholarship about dialectology and the relationship between different Turkic lects.Footnote 15 While comprehensive in their approaches, they each looked in depth at particular works of his, without providing a diachronic opinion of the evolution of his views; a lacuna I hope to bridge in the current study. Eyvazov, in contrast, applied analysis similar to my own with respect to Çobanzade's handling of grammatical categories, interrogating and problematizing his search for uniquely Turkic means of describing Turkic linguistic categories.Footnote 16 Eyvazov's most recent work, on Bekir Çobanzade's etymological scholarship, brings this discussion one step further by investigating his linguistic theories and hypotheses diachronically, as well as in the light of contemporary linguistic research.Footnote 17 It is my hope to complete the trifecta by bringing his language classification paradigms into a similar analytic space.
In Ukraine, we find the most comprehensive view to Çobanzade's oeuvre and legacy. In 2003, Adile M. Eminova published an annotated transliteration of Qırımtatar İlmi Sarfı.Footnote 18 It was followed by a 2006 paper based largely on this work, with a brief look at Çobanzade's approach to Turkic dialectology and linguistic classification. Emirova, however, does not dwell long on how his analysis compares synchronically or diachronically, preferring to outline the work's contents before moving on.Footnote 19 In 2013, Isliamova compiled a trilingual (Russian–Crimean Tatar–English) bibliography of his works, complete with a biographical sketch of the man from birth to death.Footnote 20 In the same year, Ursu published a comprehensive Russian-language biography, drawing on myriad sources, both published and unpublished, to give us the most complete view of Çobanzade's life available to date.Footnote 21 Finally, these disparate sources of information are gradually coming together as scholars seek to take in the totality of his works and to make sense of his contribution to a myriad of fields. To help to this end, Usmanova's Reference Usmanova2013 Ukrainian-language overview of scholarship about Çobanzade provides us with some sense of its lasting influence on Turkology and Turkic literary studies, as well as areas in which work has yet to be done.Footnote 22
It is my hope to build on from this solid, if uneven, basis. The current paper will rely on much of the aforementioned groundwork completed about Çobanzade's life story, and add to it a long-term analysis of his linguistic writings. I hope to make explicit the relationship between the author's context and the ebb and flow of his scholarly work, evaluating it against contemporary scholarship, in contrast to many of the papers that have come before this one. In doing so, I want to emphasize Çobanzade's flexibility towards science and politics. This malleability of identity and ideology, I believe, reflects the circumstances of his own life, which is the beginning of our journey through the writings of Bekir Çobanzade.
From Shepherd's Son to Black Sheep
Bekir Çobanzade was born in Qarasuvbazar, Crimea (Belogorsk in Russian and Bilohirs'k in Ukrainian) on 27 May 1893, or 15 May 1893 according to the old calendar. His family name, which means “son of a shepherd”, was no accident: his father was indeed a shepherd, and his mother a homemaker. Çobanzade completed his first years of schooling in Qarasuvbazar. There is some dispute as to whether this amounted to three or four years in a ruşdiye, or a school in which there was a heavy emphasis on secular and administrative subjects. By 1909, he was in Istanbul, studying at the school of a Muslim charitable institution, which he completed in 1914. In addition to the accounts of Çobanzade's acquaintances and friends during his youth, these facts have also been substantiated by the transcripts of other Crimean intellectuals who were interrogated in Baku Prison at the start of the Great Terror in 1937.Footnote 23
What happened next is a bit hazy, as there is little documentary evidence to show what Çobanzade did between 1914 and 1918. Nonetheless, his biographer Dmitrii Ursu believes that he returned to Crimea and Odessa, making use of the three-month window after the start of World War I when the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires remained open. After a short stay, Ursu contends, Çobanzade left Odessa illegally, returning to Istanbul to continue his studies in an informal manner.Footnote 24 He soon came into contact with Hungarian Turkologists in Istanbul, who assisted him to leave the city in 1916 and begin his studies in Budapest that year.Footnote 25 He studied the standard course load of a Turkology student, while also having the opportunity, according to visas in his passport, to travel through various European countries. It appears that Çobanzade attained a fairly proficient level of Hungarian, a fact that undoubtedly allowed him to remain abreast of developments in Hungarian studies of the Turkic languages even after his return to Crimea.Footnote 26
Çobanzade apparently decided to return to Crimea from Hungary in 1920, following Miklos Horthy's anti-Communist coup the previous year. It is unclear whether this political event, or the more mundane subject of his finances, compelled him to leave.Footnote 27 The young man travelled back to his home territory via Istanbul, arriving in the Peninsula that same year. He might have spent time in Baku on his way back, given some of the personal annotations to his poetry that we will see below. Not much was known about the time that he spent in the region in the 1920s until after the opening of the archives of the Crimean NKVD, as Çobanzade remained somewhat of a pariah until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.Footnote 28 What we have learned since then provides some context for his early works, and possible clues about his rapid conversion to Soviet orthodoxy throughout that decade. In my opinion, the most important aspect of his public life during this time was his participation in the National Party (Milli Firqa) during the Russian Civil War. The main goals of the Party were the protection and promotion of Crimean Tatar language and culture, the development of the socio-economic conditions of the Crimean Tatars, and the representation of their political aims. Similar to many of the early Soviet Turkic intellectuals in Central Asia and Siberia, Çobanzade began his career as a nationalist, not a socialist.
As a comprehensive study of the Milli Firqa is not yet widely available, we cannot say to what extent its political platform or ideology would have impacted the linguistic work of Çobanzade in later years. We do know that the arrival of the Soviet Army in 1920, and the complete absorption of Crimea into the sphere of Soviet authority in 1921, led to the integration of Firqa members into the Soviet state apparatus. They were eventually assigned administrative and leadership roles within the region. The Milli Firqa members and the Bolsheviks sought out common ground in their opposition to European imperialism and Great Russian chauvinism. It became rapidly apparent as the early 1920s progressed, however, that the Bolsheviks were less inclined to share power in Crimea (or elsewhere) than originally believed. The Crimean Tatar intellectuals who were integrated were thus not able to chart their own course, but did manage, to some degree, to influence the implementation of Soviet policy for the benefit of Crimean Tatars living on the Peninsula.Footnote 29
This course of events mirrors the course of Çobanzade's own activities, particularly with respect to his interest in the Crimean Tatar language and socio-economic conditions in the 1920s. Rather than pursuing a policy of open opposition to Soviet authority, he was first chosen to work as a professor at Tavrida National University in Aqmescit (Simferopol) and later elected as a member of the Central Executive Committee for the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in 1922. In 1924 he left for Baku, where he worked on the New Turkic Alphabet Committee, eventually participating in the organization of the 1st All-Union Turkological Conference in 1926. As will be seen from some of the publications listed below, Çobanzade did not sever ties with Crimea even after his move to Baku.Footnote 30
From 1928 onward, however, his various activities came under greater official scrutiny, as accusations of “bourgeois nationalism” in both his past affiliations (especially his participation in Milli Firqa) and his contemporary interpretations of linguistic data brought him negative attention.Footnote 31 He continued to work at the University of Baku in the early 1930s, and to undertake business trips to Uzbekistan in order to conduct research and deliver lectures. As late as 1935, he was selected as a member of the Paris Linguistic Society, but the noose closed soon after that.Footnote 32 Çobanzade was arrested on 28 January 1937 in Kislovodsk and transferred to Baku. On 12 October 1937, he was tried and convicted by a court during a twenty-minute process, part of three days of trials of scholars, writers and journalists. The following day, he was executed along with many of these other members of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia.Footnote 33
A Bifurcated Tongue
Çobanzade's publication career began in Crimea, where he penned poetry and short articles for the region's various Turkic periodicals. The poems “Uzaq Tavlar” (“Far Mountains”),Footnote 34 “Bulutlar” (“Clouds”)Footnote 35 and “Dunay Taşa” (“The Danube Swells”)Footnote 36 attest to his literary skill, while the latter two, written during his studies in Budapest, also give us an idea of the impact that Hungary had on the young scholar's imagination.Footnote 37 It should hardly be surprising, then, that in the fourth issue of the magazine Yeşil Ada (Green Island), Çobanzade authored a short article on the “Hungarian World” (“Macar Dünyası”). Written in a Kipchak dialect of Crimean Tatar (like his poetry), the piece is a panegyric to Hungary and the Hungarian people, whose hospitality, warmth and generosity Çobanzade feels obliged to describe. The brief article makes no mention about the possible connections between the Hungarian and Turkic languages. What it does do, however, is highlight Çobanzade's awareness of the importance of language change and management in the construction and preservation of the national idea. He is particularly vocal in his praise for Hungarians’ pride in their tongue, and the manner in which nativist vocabulary is found for contemporary foreign concepts.Footnote 38 It is an early indication of the author's consciousness of language as a political and social tool, one for which prescriptive and interventionist linguistics is as important as its descriptive counterpart.
Beyond this, however, the language of Çobanzade's articles provides yet another layer of complexity in our investigation of his approach to Turkic linguistic divisions. Born in a village in south-central Crimea, it is no surprise that he employs in his early articles a Steppe dialect (Çöl şivesi). This subset of dialects – distinguished from Istanbul Turkish through the presence of the -gan past, among other features – formed the basis of the written Crimean language standardized during the first decades of Soviet rule. Pedagogical and cultural reform were important topics for Çobanzade, but his perception of their direction did not, apparently, coincide with that of the Soviet authorities. In particular, his choice of dialect differed in articles written for the Crimean monthly Oquv İşleri (Reading Matters), published in 1925. In this article – about three mediaeval administrative documents from Crimea found during a trip to Leningrad – Çobanzade employs an Oghuz dialect similar to Istanbul Turkish, rather than the Steppe dialect one that would feed into the standard language. The entire periodical was, indeed, produced in this particular dialect. Yet it was not identified as a coastal Crimean or dialectical publication, but rather as a Crimean one; just as Yeşil Ada was. Publishing and the publishing industry, then, was evidently not a hard and fast tool for the enunciation and delimitation of linguistic norms and nomenclatures, in spite of its usefulness for the conveyance of Bolshevik ideas to the population at large.
We cannot interpret Çobanzade's decision to employ the Oghuz dialect instead of the Steppe one as a general statement on the appropriateness of one dialect as the basis of standardized Crimean Tatar. Three different pieces from the Crimean magazine İleri (Forward) demonstrate Çobanzade's ambivalence about the use of a particular lect. In Medeniy Yapıcılıqta Türk-Tatar İnteligentsiyasınıñ Borçları (Turco-Tatar Contributions to the Construction of Civilization)Footnote 39 and Yeni Türkiye (New Turkey),Footnote 40 Çobanzade employs the Oghuz dialect. It is apt that he makes mention of the work of the nineteenth-century Crimean intellectual Ismail Gasprinskii in the first article, as it appears that Çobanzade is leaning towards the use of the Oghuz dialect, as did Gasprinski, for the creation of a pan-Turkic medium of expression and discussion.Footnote 41 These articles deal with issues of importance for peoples across the Turkic fringe of the Soviet Union; a collectivity for which no one dialect creates a natural space of mutual comprehension. Whether constructing a history of Turkic intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or reviewing new publications on the Turkish Republic, Çobanzade evidently felt it important to make use of a lingua franca, a Turkic equivalent of the Arabic fuṣḥá, divorced from the majority speech community in the region in which his periodical was published. Strictly speaking, this is not Istanbul Turkish, as it makes use of a fair number of Russian terms, but neither is it reliant on the same corpus of Arabic or Persianate terms favoured by pre-Revolutionary writers.
This is contrasted by a third piece from İleri, published in the eighth issue from 1926. Here we find a poem entitled Qalpaq Maxreci (The Origin of the Qalpaq), a two-page composition written entirely in a Steppe dialect.Footnote 42 The poem was composed in 1920 while Çobanzade was in Baku, according to a brief endnote. The use of the Steppe dialect mirrors the publication of poetry and prose (both fiction and non-fiction) in the rest of this issue and others, alongside Oghuz-dialect works by other authors. It does not appear that Çobanzade authored other articles for İleri or different magazines in the Steppe dialect, preferring instead the Oghuz one. This is especially evident once he had migrated to Baku, and was producing materials for an Azeri (and therefore Oghuz-speaking) audience. But this former dialect, despite the author's eschewing it for scholarly purposes, remained a means of poetic expression, one that he did not disavow even after he moved to Azerbaijan. A number of his poems were republished in their original Steppe dialect form either as individual pieces or in anthologies well into the 1930s.Footnote 43 This, at a time when he was bemoaning the lack of new literary production in the Oghuz dialects of the southern Crimean coast.Footnote 44 The desire to help spur the growth of national literatures in national languages, then, was apparently not as pressing an issue to Çobanzade as might be assumed from his writings.
On another level, however, his use of language does belie a desire to link written and oral forms, and to allow for an explicit recognition of the linguistic diversity so often hidden by diglossia. Unlike Gasprinskii, Çobanzade wrote his prose and poetry, regardless of the dialect, in a modified form of the Arabic abjad. He did not opt for the radical inclusion of letters as seen in Uzbek and Kazakh publications of the 1920s, or indeed of later Kurdish and Uyghur works. What he did do was create a closer correspondence between the sounds of Turkic lects and the manner which they were represented in the Arabic script. Thus, his articles in Oquv İşleri, Yeşil Ada and İleri still feature the velarized consonants ṣād, ḍād, ṭā’ and ẓā’ in their original usage in some Arabic words, despite their complete absence from Turkic phonemic inventories. In others, however, they are replaced by their non-velarized counterparts in an almost random fashion. Similarly, a greater number of vowels are marked either using the semi-vowel graphemes or the hā’-cum-a common in contemporary Uyghur orthography. It therefore appears that Çobanzade's aim was not to preserve the unity of Turkic lects under an umbrella pan-Turkic idiom (as would occur with Arabic), but rather the creation of a space for exchange and discussion that did not erase local phenomena and peculiarities.Footnote 45 If this was indeed his intention, it was far from successful, as even those works in the Oghuz dialect were translated into local official standards when reproduced in Uzbek or Tatar periodicals.
On the whole, then, our author's attachment to language and linguistic change was an ambivalent, if not fraught, one. Nationalist and proponent of linguistic and pedagogical reform, Çobanzade's writings demonstrate an approach to the use of lects and languages that is not underpinned by chauvinism or exclusivity. He was evidently keen on ensuring widespread readership and exchange, but also active in the promotion of individual dialects to the prestigious status of literary language. Together, these facts inhibit us from tagging him as a firm traditionalist or an ardent Marxist-Leninist, a conclusion borne out even more by an investigation of his works relating directly to the classification of languages.
Çobanzade's Linguistic Analysis
Our first example of Çobanzade's approach to language categorization and organization comes from his work Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyatına Medhal (Introduction to Turco-Tatar Linguistics), published in Baku in 1924. This is a general overview of the Turkic languages, providing readers with an entry point to the basic concepts of linguistics, and then applying them to the study of the Turkic family.Footnote 46 For the purposes of this study, I have made use of the 2007 reprint of Çobanzade's collected works, in which they are transliterated into the contemporary Azerbaijani Latin alphabet.Footnote 47 Before even touching the classification of the Turkic languages, the author seeks to provide an understanding of the types of languages that exist in the world. Here, he notes that “languages’ similarity to one another in form cannot prove their closeness to one another, or their descent.” Just as similar external and internal conditions in the natural world can bring about the same animals and plants on different continents, so too can similar conditions bring about the same linguistic phenomena coincidentally.Footnote 48 It is in this discussion that Çobanzade is able to first explain the difference between analytic, isolating and various synthetic languages – including the agglutinative Turkic ones – before explaining that no one particular category is representative of a higher level of socio-economic or spiritual development.Footnote 49 This is a challenge to Marr's theories of language change, and, obliquely, some quarters of contemporary Soviet linguistics.Footnote 50
Language Names and Groups
A bit further on, we find Çobanzade's direct approach to the topic of historical linguistics and the descent of particular languages from a parent. This is explained first with the use of the Indo-European grouping, and then we are introduced to the Ural-Altaic family, which includes the Finno-Ugric, Samoyed, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turco-Tatar languages. The fifth member of this group is further subdivided into twenty different members:
1. Yakut
2. Altay Turkic languages
3. Teleut (Oirot)
4. Komandin (along the uber Obi River; Qumanda?)
5. Yenisei Turkic languages
6. Uriankhai (along the east of Mongolia; Tuvan?)
7. Parapin (Barabin; Siberian Tatar)
8. Kyrgyz
9. Nogay
10. Kumyk
11. Karachay
12. Bashkir
13. Sart
14. Uzbek
15. Turkmen
16. Ottoman Turkish
17. Tatar (Crimean and Qazan)
18. Azerbaijani
19. Chuvash
20. Kun (Cuman)
This listing is culled from European and Russian sources, and the author rejects, partly, such division as an overemphasis of difference on the part of these linguists and scholars. Rather, according to Çobanzade, these lects are all part of a single Turkic language group. The only two members of the list with “a completely separate morphology and lexicon” are Chuvash and Yakut, which are granted the title lisan, or language. He goes on to claim that the remaining linguistic communities do not have grammars or lexicons that would make them incomprehensible to other Turks.Footnote 51 This argumentation is highly disingenuous, and likely belies Çobanzade's unfamiliarity with at least some of the languages named. Consider, for example, Teleut or Oirot, which is today recognized as a branch of the Mongolic languages, not the Turkic ones.Footnote 52 Moreover, the distinction between Sart and Uzbek is far from well understood. Contemporary scholarship – and indeed early Soviet scholarship too – is still not in agreement as to whether both reflect linguistic and ethnic communities, or if the former might actually be a socio-economic category.Footnote 53 Nonetheless, Çobanzade's analysis highlights a desire to preserve an indigenous imagining of a unified and homogenized Turkic linguistic sphere. It was a dream promoted by Gasprinskii and defended by Ziya Gökalp, who saw language as the primary factor in the reignition of a unifying Turkic, or even Turanic, national consciousness.Footnote 54
Çobanzade's rebuttal of Western and Russian scholarship is tempered, however, by the concession that there was a split in the tenth to twelfth centuries between Chagatai and Oghuz Turkic. The former encapsulated the speech communities in the north (Central Asia, Kashgar, Siberia, Volga, Crimea and Kuban, as well as the Cumans), while the latter embraced what would become Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Ottoman, Seljuk, Rumelian Turkish and other Turkic communities of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 55 Again, this is misleading, as Chagatai refers to the literary (rather than spoken) language of these communities, only some of which would have descended from communities where the language was originally spoken in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Meanwhile the Oghuz were an ethno-political grouping who swept westward out of Central Asia in the tenth century.Footnote 56 Contemporary linguists recognize Oghuz as a comprehensive branch of the Turkic languages, drawing in part upon the compact nature of the population movement, but not “Chagatai”; especially given that the Çobanzade's delineation covers the Kipchak, Karluk and Siberian branches of the family.Footnote 57 What this schema does reveal, however, is the author's desire to preserve Turkic understandings of the community from within; an attempt to accede to Western classificatory epistemologies without giving up the right to name one's own in-group.
The Phonological Approach
Next comes a flying overview of the history of Altaic studies, as well as attempts at linking Sumerian, Etruscan and Caucasian languages to Turkic ones. Here, as with the broader links between ancient Finnic and Turkic languages, Çobanzade asks for further study of paleographic documents in order to confirm or deny, and to understand of just what order such links might be. On the whole, however, he is agnostic about the importance of such studies, preferring instead to focus on the present. In this return to contemporary linguistics, he reiterates his criticism of the broad field of European Orientalists for their reliance on political, ethnographic and anthropological information in the categorization of the Turkic linguistic varieties, instead of focusing solely on linguistic, especially phonological, data. The one exception to this situation, in Çobanzade's view, is Radlov, who divided the Turkic speech communities into four broad swathes:
Eastern (Altai, Barabin, Obi, Yenisei)
Western (Kyrgyz, Western Siberian, Bashkir, Volga Tatar)
Central Asian (Taranchi (Kashgar, Eastern Turkestan and Kulcha), Sart, Uzbek (Khiva, Bukhara)
Southern (Turkmen, Crimean, Azerbaijani, Ottoman (Anatolian and Rumelian))
Chuvash and Yakut stand as separate languages, too distinct to be considered as part of the contemporary Turkic family. Such a decision to exclude is not seen as being a universal truth, particularly given Németh's inclusion of the two languages in his phonological studies of Turkic speech patterns; an inclusion by which Çobanzade is only partly satisfied. Whether taking into account Radlov's categorizations or Németh's (as quoted in the work under consideration), Çobanzade believes that such schema serve to highlight and emphasize the differences among related dialects, in spite of the obvious similarities between them.Footnote 58 For our author, then, language classifications become a matter of staking out the outer boundaries of the group, rather than organizing its inner structure.
On Language and Race
The final component of this particular work that concerns our present study is a small section on the links between race (ırq) and language (lisan). Çobanzade's rejection of linguism is short and swift: “As language is the strongest implement of civilization and social life, it passes from one nation (millǝt) to another.” He gives the Sarts – who he claims were originally Persians – as a clear example of a non-Turkic community gradually adopting a Turkic idiom; the product of a myriad of socio-economic, historical, political, religious and other factors.Footnote 59 This is a forceful denunciation of attempts to link the two analytical concepts, current among a number of contemporary Turkic scholars in exile or in Turkey.Footnote 60 It is also an indication that, regardless of the idealistic, anti-materialist ideas to which Çobanzade might ascribe or seek to include in his conceptualization of linguistics, these are not informed by the nationalist drive fed by similar dynamics among contemporary European scholars. Such social or spiritual content is to be left for a different discussion, one that is no less important than linguistic classification, but undoubtedly distinct from it.Footnote 61
The remainder of Çobanzade's work is dedicated to different aspects of linguistics and their relationship to the Turkic languages, including a detailed overview of the history of Turkic linguistics. These sections do not bear upon his view of linguistic classification, but one aspect that is particularly telling regards his overarching approach to linguistics. In discussing the history of linguistic approaches to the Turkic languages, the author sews together pre-Islamic, Islamic and European (including Russian) scholarly activities around understanding and documenting the various speech communities. Clichés aside, Çobanzade's concern appears to have been bridging the divide between various epistemologies and linguistic traditions, seeking to infuse Turkic peoples’ visions of themselves into the supposedly objective understandings of them by Western scholarship. Far from toeing the line of Soviet orthodoxy, he was acting as a synthesizer, attacking the perceived colonialist and orientalist biases of the social sciences from an altogether different point of view to that of the Bolsheviks.
Dialect versus Language
The ideas of the Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyatına Mǝdxǝl are repeated, grosso modo, in Çobanzade's Qırımtatar İlm-i Sarf (Grammar of Crimean Tatar), published in 1925 in Aqmescit (Simferopol). This is a scholarly work of descriptive, rather than prescriptive, analysis. In the introduction to the work, Çobanzade tackles briefly the history and division of the Turkic languages, noting their antiquity and the pre-Islamic historical and cultural information preserved in their lexicon. More importantly, he makes use of Kaşgarlı Mahmut's seminal Divanu Lügati't-Türk to demonstrate that tribal and dialectical difference have existed among Turkic speakers for at least nine hundred years. This combination of historical and contemporary evidence is the basis of his claim that “20 speech patterns (şive)” of Turkic languages exist, with Chuvash and Yakut the only distinct languages, and Kyrgyz approaching the classification of a distinct tongue.Footnote 62 To this rehashing of the Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyatına Mǝdxǝl, he adds a succinct distinction between the various forms of speech community he envisions:
Just as “speech pattern” (şive) is the name given to the particularities of one group's arrangement of words, “dialect” (lehçe) [is the name given] to the speaking style of a larger group, and “language” (dil) that applied to an even larger group than these.Footnote 63
The crux of the matter, then, is not merely one of linguistic characteristics or peculiarities, but also of socio-economic delineations. If there is any doubt about the idea that the size of these groups refers not only to the numbers of people sharing specific speech characteristics, but also of a broader imagined community united by non-linguistic components, Çobanzade provides an example from Anatolia. Here, he states that Kastamonu produces a speech pattern (şive); Ottoman fulfils the role of a dialect (lehçe) and Turkish or Turkic is the language (dil) under which both fall. The fact that Turkic speakers from Istanbul and Kashgar would be hard-pressed to understand one another in normal speech does not seem to factor into his calculations.Footnote 64
A later part of Qırımtatar İlm-i Sarf deals directly and in-depth with the issue of the origins and divisions of the Turkic languages. Here, the author provides readers with a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between Turkic languages and those spoken around them, as well as among the Turkic languages and dialects themselves. By remaining agnostic as to the exact place of origin of the language group, he is able to address immediately the Turkic-ness of the various grammatical particles in use across Eurasia. In particular, Çobanzade rejects the idea that the use of a -miş/mış/muş/müş past is any more or less Turkic than the use of the -gan/qan/ghan/ken/gen forms.Footnote 65 If we apply this to his earlier literary oeuvre, it implies that his Steppe dialect poetry is no less Turkic in form than his Oghuz scholarly writings; both are equally valid enunciations of Turkic cultural production. His choice of one dialect or another is one of personal preference and individual expression, not a marker of an essentialized identity.
I omit most of what follows this section, as it is essentially the same as in the Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyatına Medhal. The final chapter, on the history of the Turkic languages, only adds to our understanding of Çobanzade's scheme through oblique references. This is a history of Turkic literature, with nods to linguistic history thrown in for appropriate effect. As a result, classification is not mentioned explicitly, but the insistence on calling this a history of the language, combined with occasional information on the phonemic or morphological make-up of Orhon, Uyghur and Chagatai lects gives the impression that these three communities existed on a neat, linear trajectory. In other words, discussion of the transitions from Uyghur to Chagatai create the understanding that the two are closely related,Footnote 66 despite the fact that contemporary scholarship in Europe and Asia would place them in two separate branches.Footnote 67 This neat chronology, while ostensibly designed to aid the understanding of Turkic literary history, is a fudge likely aimed at, as the author has urged before, papering over the early and profound division of Turkic dialects.
Geographic Markers
Çobanzade's writings from the late 1920s provide an even greater understanding of the manner in which his increasingly public position within Soviet spheres interacted with his scholarly interests. In particular, as an active member of various bodies tasked with issues of an administrative or political nature, his output now takes into account explicitly practical and ideological questions, as well as academic ones.
The first article to consider is his “Azərbaycan İmla Kongresi” (“Azerbaijan's Spelling Congress”), published in the Azeri periodical Maarif İşçisi (Education Worker) in 1927.Footnote 68 Although Çobanzade's task is to explain the purpose and aims of the spelling and alphabet reforms taking place across the Soviet Union, he makes use of this opportunity to explore more widely the issue of Turkic language reform and development. He starts by explaining, roughly, the differences between descriptive and proscriptive grammars, likening the work of linguists who seek to intervene in language processes to other aspects of state intervention in society. This, according to Çobanzade, is essential across the Turkic world, especially for those peoples “not having a writing and literature of their own, such as (the Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Taranjis, Bashkirs, Karachays, Balkars …)”.Footnote 69 Even for the Azeris, who are presumed to be far more advanced in their socio-economic development than these other groups, Çobanzade cautions, the language issue is one of great importance.
It is at this point that the author delves directly into the thornier issue of language classification. Despite his later defence of the objectivity and scientificity of linguistics and Turkology, he presents here a parallax approach to the classification of linguistic dialects. He looks at the dialects of Azerbaijan and describes them from the point of view of Azeris’ “southern comrades”, speakers of Istanbul Turkish, for whom Azeri dialects appear foreign enough in their non-Oghuz characteristics to be considered dialects of a different branch or group. For the author, however, such Istanbul-centrism might be countered by considering them as dialects of Azerbaijan, rather than Azeri dialects of Oghuz Turkish. Here, he aims at a form of classification that takes into account the historical development of Azerbaijan's Turkic communities, countering a perceived essentialist and purist bias on the part of the Republic of Turkey's linguists. If there are non-Oghuz elements in Azeri speech patterns – a multiplicity of which exist, he is keen to note – these are the product of the waves of Turkic speakers who settled in the region from the south, the north and the east, bringing with them non-Oghuz varieties of Turkic.Footnote 70
What does this mean for the science of linguistic classification? At play here is a wider battle between Marxist understandings of history and the nationalist-tinged conceptualizations common in Atatürk's republic. Language, similar to ethnicity and nation, is to be seen as a complex imbrication of varied elements and should be classified as such. Çobanzade is careful not to enunciate the belief that Istanbul Turkish is in any way a purer, more Oghuz form of speech than the dialects spoken to the east, but it is exactly this idea at which he is hinting. He is therefore keen to insist on categorizing language geographically as a means to an end: a shorthand for the theatre of action on which different groups influenced and merged with one another, producing unique speech communities defined by their historical circumstances. Language classification, then, had become a battleground for an ideological war; one waged in many other disciplines, each of them crucial to the definition of the value and potential of humans of all origins.
Dialects of Difference
During that same year, Çobanzade returned to the issue of linguistic divisions in a big way with his monograph Türk-Tatar Dialektolijisi, published in Baku. The motivation for this work is partly academic – a desire to expand a science concerned primarily with Indo-European languages to the Turkic ones – and partly political. In the introduction to the work, Çobanzade recognizes that “the beginnings of the emergence of pedagogical, scholarly and creative literatures in many of the Turco-Tatar dialects following the October [1917] Revolution has increased the importance of studies of these [Turkic] dialects.”Footnote 71 Such is the reason why a comprehensive approach to the “geography” of the Turkic languages is needed, particularly for students at Baku University's Oriental Studies Faculty working with texts from live Turkic dialects. But perhaps another reason behind the urgency for such a manual was also the creeping infusion of Marxist-Leninist precepts into the social sciences across the Soviet Union. The opening chapter of the work refers readers back to the Türk-Tatar Lisaniyyatına Medhal for discussions on the nature of dialects and languages, but also adds in more information about the socio-economic nature of some speech communities. It makes explicit reference to professional speech communities and argots, but also to the class-based divisions between the speech patterns of peasants, workers, feudal elites and capitalists.Footnote 72 Such calques on Lenin's writings about language will be seen in greater detail below.
This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of new takes on old problems. Çobanzade recognizes the difficulty in drawing boundaries between similar speech communities or dialects in his overview of Turkic dialectology, but he also stresses the importance of not mixing any one speech community with another. Here, rather than decrying the penchant of European linguists to look for difference, Çobanzade himself emphasizes the fact that each distinct community links language to a particular physical and cultural geography. He brings to the fore the idea that there exists a historically contextualized set of circumstances that, in addition to phonology, morphology and lexicon, distinguish each community from neighbouring ones.Footnote 73 This departure from previous theories is no surprise, given the Stalinist definition of the nation as composed of four distinct factors (territory; language; economic life; psychic life, including national consciousness).Footnote 74 The revisionism extends to his use of sources as well, as he notes that Kaşgarlı Mahmut's division of dialect groups was undoubtedly based on administrative, political and economic groups; that is, that it was founded on the economic base, rather than an idealist imagination.Footnote 75 These are the first inklings that we have of the author bringing his own views into line with Soviet orthodoxy in the post-Lenin period.
Indeed, in the following section on the history of Turco-Tatar dialectology, Çobanzade provides an incredibly detailed approach to the history of the study of Turkic speech communities, repeating with greater emphasis his earlier work on Turkic linguistics. Here, however, he stops to comment on the frequent tropes of a single Turkic space. This appears in scholarship from Kaşgarlı Mahmut up to nineteenth-century adventurers. One of the most common is the claim that a single language allows the individual to be understood from the “Ice-bound [Arctic] Ocean to the coasts of the Adriatic”.Footnote 76 This, the author points out, is neither here nor there, as the important point of dialectology is to discover difference, not insist on similarity. Rigid internal boundaries, in this case, are not only a prerequisite for the contemporary existence of distinct Soviet Turkic nations; they are also a necessary means of warding off the taint of pan-Turkism.
The final part of this section relates to the work of European, primarily Russian, Turkologists and their assessments of the various Turkic languages. Much space is devoted to Radlov and his scheme of dialects (as outlined above), which Çobanzade appears to accept as a more sensible starting point for the classification of Turkic lects. We see here the recognition of a division between Oghuz, Kipchak and Northern dialects (in addition to Chuvash and Yakut), something not made explicit in Çobanzade's earlier works. What is exceptionally new is the space that the author devotes to the work and scholarship of Radlov's student, Professor Samoilovich, whose divisions are based on historical linguistic patterns, rather than contemporary linguistic analysis alone.Footnote 77 The lack of an evaluation of the diachronic method of language classification is interesting, given Çobanzade's later criticism of some of Samoilovich's theories on particular Turkic lects.Footnote 78 Nonetheless, in the absence of anything explicit from the author in this particular work, it is hard to tell whether he believed such an approach to be useful.
The rest of the work consists of three sections: an overview of the main features of each of the dialect groups; a collection of sample texts from each of them, with explanations in Azerbaijani; and a bibliography, organized according to language of interest. The most important part of these sections is, right at the start, Çobanzade's division of the various dialect groupings up for study. These are:
Chuvash – Yakut – Siberian and Altay – Yenisei – Oriankhai – Kazakh and Kyrgyz – Eastern Turkistan – Turkistan – Ural and Volga – Caucasus – Southern Russia – Asia Minor: We are of a mind to give here specific information about the main Turkic speech communities to our readers; or more correctly, about the Turco-Tatar peoples who speak in these lects, their genesis and borders, and their approximate numbers.Footnote 79
In other words, Çobanzade now resists giving his own listing of particular languages or lects, in spite of considerable effort spent discussing the historical background to the science of Turkic dialectology. Broad, generic geographical regions are used instead, and this is likely no coincidence. He worked on numerous committees dedicated to orthographic and linguistic reform among Turkic communities in the Soviet Union, and was intimately acquainted with the manner in which such knowledge or decisions could have political consequences.
Devil in the Details
By 1929, we have evidence of Çobanzade's adherence to the most orthodox understanding of classification according to grammatical similarities and differences. In his article on the Kumyk language and its literary heritage, he casually asserts that Kumyk, according to its grammatical features, clearly belongs to the Kipchak family of Turkic languages.Footnote 80 It is worth noting here that he uses the Russian word язык or “language”, equivalent to the Turkic dil or til, rather than something that approaches şive (“speech pattern”) or lehçe (“dialect”), as he did in his Crimean Tatar monograph from 1925. The ultimate goal of Çobanzade's article is to hypothesize, through the use of historical and linguistic evidence, the relationships that exist between the Cumans and the present-day Kumyk people of the Caucasus.Footnote 81 Incidently, it was on the phonetics of Cuman as found in the Codex Cumanicus that Çobanzade based his dissertation while studying in Budapest.Footnote 82 This discussion deals with much more than just linguistic classification or lineage, and the first half of the article is, therefore, not devoted to the phenomena of language. Nonetheless, the last twenty pages or so provide the reader with an overview of Kumyk grammar, beginning with the language's place among various Turkic languages. Çobanzade links Kumyk to its closest relatives – northern Crimean Tatar and Karachay-Balkar – before explaining the phonetic and morphological features that distinguish it from these two siblings.
What is even more interesting in this article is the way that Çobanzade clearly eschews a blurring of the boundaries between linguistics and ethnography. In particular, he refutes Samoilovich's claims about links between the Kumyks and the Nogays, for example, by pointing to the likelihood of borrowing and interchange on a social level, rather than parallel historical linguistic processes that would alter the shape of the relationships within the Turkic family.Footnote 83 Classification is seen as an important expression of a scientific method; one that needs to be practised within specific disciplines, rather than across them. Çobanzade recognizes the important and ongoing influence experienced by Kumyk speakers from neighbouring languages, including Nogay and Azerbaijani, but he sees these to be matters for discussions separate from those about its genetic relationships.Footnote 84 This slight recoiling from the most radical of Leninist-Marxist reimaginings of linguistics may indeed be a reflection of a new conservatism spreading through the broader social sciences.Footnote 85 The ground was fast-moving under Çobanzade's and other writers’ feet, and he was evidently keen to ensure that he was on the right side of official censure.
The Stalinist Wave
The last piece of writing that we turn to is an article by Çobanzade from 1934 entitled “Lenin vǝ Dilcilik” (“Lenin and Linguistics”), published in the Azerbaijani periodical InqilaB vǝ Mǝdǝnijjǝt (Revolution and Civilization). This work represents a remarkable turnaround in the author's application of Soviet doctrine to a discipline of social science. It reflects the efficiency of Stalin's clampdown on scholarly diversity over the 1930s and is a prelude to the Great Terror of 1937–1938, when many academics – Çobanzade included – were murdered for alleged crimes of an ideological nature.
In “Lenin vǝ Dilcilik”, Çobanzade does not address the topic of linguistic classification directly. Nonetheless, there are key points at which we see a change in his view of the intersectionality between linguistic and class identities. Most importantly, he insists on the existence of separate linguistic cultures for the feudal-bourgeoisie class and the worker or peasant classes until the April Revolution of 1920, when the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan.Footnote 86 The predominance of Russian among the bourgeoisie would have undoubtedly implied a linguistic schism within the cities, but the addition of the “feudal” class – usually shorthand for the local Turkic elites – also implies a gap between Turkic speakers of different social categories. This is a remarkable volte-face from his writings in 1925 and 1927, in which Çobanzade spoke of Azerbaijani as a single dialect with geographical sub-dialects, all unified under a common Turkic umbrella.
Çobanzade expends much ink in this article exploring Lenin's writings for indications on the most profitable roads forward in linguistic analysis, occasionally citing Marr and his theories of language change as well. These are done in passing, and it does not appear that Çobanzade is seeking to resurrect Marr's ideas on the socio-economic classification of speech communities.Footnote 87 Indeed, not only has he come out against certain aspects of them in the past, but, by this point, they have already fallen out of favour with Stalinist linguists, although not with ethnographers looking to use language as a basis for ethnographic evolution, rather than the other way around.Footnote 88 The rest of the text is devoted to the application of Lenin's calls for a simplicity and practicality in the application of linguistic knowledge to the development of the proletariat's struggle, as well as in the fight against “local nationalisms.”Footnote 89 This latter part is key to understanding the change represented by the article. To begin with, it makes reference to Lenin's writings, as well as those of Marx and Engels, as foundational texts for understanding language as a social and concrete phenomenon. This obliterates Çobanzade's earlier appeal to the specificities of Turkic linguistic communities, and Turkic knowledge about linguistic history, in the division and classification of languages. Ever fearful of being accused of Pan-Turkism or local nationalism, an appeal to European thinkers was far safer than the construction of knowledge upon indigenous bases.
More broadly, this also points to the overbearing presence of Stalin in all discussions of nationality; a fact visible in the final paragraphs of Çobanzade's article. Decisions on allocating the title of “nation” to various communities rested on their ability to fulfil a litmus test in four categories: a common language; a common territory; a common economic life; and a common cast of mind. To decide on the existence or disappearance of a given language meant deciding on the existence or disappearance of a nationality and all its attendant rights and privileges within the Soviet system. By the 1930s, such arguments were no longer left to linguists, ethnographers, economists or anthropologists alone, but were clearly directed from the centre, informed by political and ideological constructs emanating from Stalin himself.Footnote 90 Intellectuals such as Çobanzade were reduced to pawns in a broader game, one in which the goal was survival rather than constructive contribution or advocacy.
Conclusion
According to Isliamova's bibliography of Çobanzade, he published only two more works (an article on definiteness in Turkic languages, and a poem) between the 1934 appearance of “Lenin vǝ Dilcilik” and his death in 1937.Footnote 91 As the biographical section shows, his standing among Soviet authorities had already been tarnished by this point, and the vice of Stalinist repression was beginning to tighten. Readers would have to wait until the 1950s for his works to start appearing again, and it would not be until the 1970s that mass reproduction of many of his writings would be undertaken for audiences in the Soviet Union and Turkey. In other words, it is unlikely that Çobanzade's opus had profound effects on the post-World War II generation of Soviet Turkic linguists, ethnographers and anthropologists. Nonetheless, a review of his work is an important step in understanding how political and ideological shift impact scholarship in seemingly unrelated or isolated fields.
My analysis of his writings over a fifteen-year span brings out specific aspects of this dynamic. Çobanzade's drift was a subtle one; by no means was it a single 180-degree turn. What it was, however, was a reorganization of emphasis and evidence, a prizing first of phonological and supposedly objective scientific data over traditional understandings, followed by a preoccupation with social and economic factors as well as linguistic ones. The final stage – one that came too late to save him from execution – was a direct appeal to ideology over linguistic evidence. Çobanzade hopped from Turkic to European to Stalinist stones in the swirling river of epistemological change, careful to ensure that his particular opinions and analyses did not contradict the rule of an increasingly authoritarian centre.
Çobanzade's is a life that demonstrates how abstract scholarly pursuits can have profound impacts on, and be profoundly impacted by, political and ideological discussions. In the absence of personal diaries or private correspondence, it is exceptionally difficult to determine which of these changes, if any, were motivated by personal conviction, and which by the desire to survive. Whatever his reasons, Çobanzade did not oppose these ideological currents; yet he still paid the ultimate price for his past transgressions. Science, Bekir Çobanzade discovered, is intensely political and ideological; to believe otherwise would have been the ultimate refusal of empirical evidence.
