ABSTRACT
A Successful Reform Among all the reforms promulgated by Kemal Atatürk with the aim of westemising the Republic of Turkey, the alphabet and language reforms are probably the ones that - when regarding the situation today nearly 70 years after the reform was initiated - may be characterised as the most successful. The reforms in fields such as religion and civillaw are frequently boycotted, notably in the rural districts. In the field öf language, however, even the most conservative people today, whether they like it or not, use a vocabulary strongly influenced by the reform movement. Even if conservative groups in their publications and official speeches deliberately use old-fashioned language, this language is still extremely remote from what was common in similar texts before the reform. The fact that Ottoman poetry today is so unintelligible to high-school students that it has to be taught as foreign language texts, also clearly shows that the process of replacing Arabic and Persian lexical and syntactical elements with Turkish ones has been successful. However, in the 55 years the language reform was in progress from 1928-1983, it was probably the most discussed, and, in the eyes of a large part of the population, the most unpopular of all the reforms in the Republic of Turkey.
