ABSTRACT

The terms ‘Cypriot Turk’ and ‘Cypriot Turkish’ may sound strange to many readers’ ears. For decades the accepted term was ‘Kıbrıs Türkü’, which is usually (wrongly) translated as Turkish Cypriot, but whose literal meaning is ‘Turk of Cyprus’. However, following the events of 1974, and especially in the political climate of the 1980s, many progressive intellectuals came to feel that the term ‘Kıbrıs Türkü’ betrayed certain racist undertones, a suggestion that there is a worldwide Turkish nation of which the Turkish Cypriots form a part. So they decided to change the term ‘Kıbrıs Türkü’ to ‘Kıbrıslı Türk’ (customarily, and again wrongly, translated as ‘Cypriot Turk’). In the Turkish language, the effect of this is firstly to put Cypriotness before Turkishness, and secondly to signal that Turks are to be found in many different countries, each with its own distinctive characteristics, and that the Cypriot Turks are one of those many. If we read a text written in Turkish by a Cypriot, we can easily recognize the writer’s political orientation just from his choice of one term rather than the other. 1