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How does the suppression of minoritized languages in childhood shape one’s sense of belonging, memory, and identity? |
In a few days, the first of Mehr (September 23) will arrive—a day that for most simply marks the start of classes. But for us, it recalls a bitter memory. On that day, our mother tongue was ruthlessly taken from us, left behind at the classroom doors and in the schoolyard. Not only did our childhood fall under the dominance of a foreign language, but our accent became a tool for humiliation, mockery, and delegitimization. From our very first steps, we learned that in this land, our language and accent made us guilty or suspicious in the eyes of others.
This early experience did more than turn our language into a social threat—it forged an unbreakable link between linguistic life and structural anxiety in our minds. An anxiety that rooted itself deeply in our individual and collective identity, becoming a lasting presence. Structural anxiety—a persistent layer of fear, worry, and mistrust—weakens both the individual and the surrounding social fabric, tearing them apart and threatening collapse.
Linguistic dominance was not only a tool of homogenization but also a mechanism of psychological control. Music, cinema, literature—all were in Persian—and we were forced to translate even our emotions, our loves, our dreams. Childhood, which should have been a safe haven, lost even the possibility of nostalgia under this linguistic-psychological pressure. Our memories—sweet or bitter—took on the color of alienation and could not serve as a mental refuge in adulthood. Nostalgia, the turning to the imagination of the past to escape the harshness of the present, became its opposite: a reminder of loss, of alienation, of linguistic hesitation. Turkish became inseparable from fear and anxiety, for a past unexperienced in one’s mother tongue cannot offer comfort.
Under the shadow of imposed Persian, our childhoods were deprived not only of the chance to express lived experiences directly but were reduced to incomplete translations of feeling, accumulating traumas in our minds and memories.
Some claim that bilingualism is an advantage, that we are “bilingual.” But this is a profound deception. They call our linguistic suffering an “advantage” to deny the realities of linguistic discrimination and homogenization policies. True bilingualism exists only when each language can construct its own world and share equally in presence, legitimacy, education, and support. It manifests not in the superficial multiplicity of languages but in equality of opportunity to live and express them. In a land where Persian dominates every sphere of our world and Turkish is relegated to the corners of our homes, speaking of our bilingualism, if not a deception, is certainly a grave ignorance.
We now know more than ever that language is not merely a tool of communication—it is a part of our very being. Denying a mother tongue does not destroy a tool; it manipulates and weakens the deep connection between individuality, history, and collective memory. Bilingualism, in our context, is not a description of reality but a veil concealing a disaster—a disaster that split our identity and fractured our individuality from within. Even if monolingual policies are framed as necessary for national unity, they do nothing to lessen the depth of this catastrophe. Unity forged by erasing differences is the hidden face of violence—a unity built on denying the existence of others.
We are not bilingual. We think in a denied language and live in an imposed one. This duality is not a choice; it is imposed suffering—and it is precisely from this suffering that our resistance grows, from the anguish of voicelessness and the anxiety deposited in our bodies from our earliest days.