The European Day of Languages is celebrated each year on September 26. It was established in 2001 by a joint initiative of the Council of Europe and the European Commission.
Although Turkey is a member of the Council of Europe, its linguistic policies have led to the eradication of many native languages spoken on its soil.
A dying language represents a vanishing history, and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) holds some of the world’s most precious — yet endangered — native tongues.
For instance, Cappadocian Greek and Mlahso, an Aramaic dialect, are now extinct in Turkey. Hértevin and Turoyo (Surayt), both Aramaic dialects, are severely endangered.
Furthermore, Pontic Greek (Romeyka), Laz, Western Armenian, and Homshetsma (spoken by the Armenian Hemshin people) are all endangered languages on the brink of extinction.
Ladino, also known as Judezmo, which is traditionally spoken by Turkey’s shrinking Jewish community, is also classified as a severely endangered language.
The fate of these communities mirrors the fate of their languages. Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other non-Turkish citizens of Turkey did not simply choose to stop speaking their native languages. Instead, most were massacred, deported, or forced to leave their ancestral homelands. And those who remained in the country were subjected to immense pressure to cease speaking their languages.
The Ottoman Empire and the Turkish nationalist movement carried out a systematic campaign of genocide against indigenous Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations between 1913 and 1923. This resulted in approximately 3 million deaths and the near-total elimination of these communities from Anatolia.
The genocide targeted not only the lives of Christians, but also their cultural heritage, including schools that they had built through much sacrifice and hard work. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute reports that despite facing severe difficulties in acquiring building permissions, Armenians successfully established a vast educational network of nearly 2,000 schools serving over 173,000 pupils in eastern Turkey prior to World War I.
Today, no Armenian schools remain in eastern Turkey, and only 16 are left in Istanbul. Reports show Armenian schools in the country operate without government funding, relying on private donations while continuing to encounter systematic discrimination.
In addition, the Armenian Patriarchate data confirms the steady demographic decline of Turkey’s Armenian population. In 2025, the community recorded 183 baptisms and 527 funerals. The total population is estimated at roughly 40,000.
In 2021, it was reported that Turkey's 22 remaining Armenian, Jewish, and Greek community schools were grappling with budget deficits and dropping student numbers. Garo Paylan, an Armenian deputy of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said that “Armenians, Greeks and Jews are trying to keep minority schools alive, and they are trying to pay salaries for their teachers, and to meet the needs of students, but they do not have enough resources.”
Of all minority communities in Turkey, the Assyrian community experiences the most acute marginalization concerning the right to education in its native language. This practice constitutes a direct violation of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the foundational text that ended World War I and defined Turkey's modern borders. The treaty specifically protects non-Muslim minorities, legally requiring the state to uphold their educational and civic rights.
However, the educational rights of Assyrians/Syriacs have never been protected, even though they are a non-Muslim minority of the country. The last Assyrian/Syriac school in the city of Mardin closed in 1928, leaving the community without formal education in its mother tongue for decades.
Following a rejected request in 2012 and a subsequent two-year legal battle, the Assyrian community won the right to open a kindergarten in Istanbul. However, they lack government financial support, as well as classes at the primary and secondary levels.
Genocide in Turkey did not end when the killing stopped; it continues as the memory of the victims and their heritage languages are erased.
The case for preserving Pontic Greek heritage is urgent. Following the massacres of Anatolian Greeks, the community suffered a century of cultural silencing in Turkey.
Stripped of any place in education, literature, or broadcast media, the ancient Pontic Greek dialect — Romeyka — was forcibly exiled to the private sphere of the home. Traumatized by persecution and desperate to shield their children from social alienation, generations were forced to pass down Turkish instead of their heritage tongue. Today, as field researchers from the Romeyka Project warn, this severed intergenerational transmission has pushed a living link to antiquity to the brink of eradication.
From the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a state-sponsored linguistic cleansing was designed to completely erase non-Turkish languages from public life.
In 1928, a campaign to force non-Turkish speakers to speak Turkish in public — with the slogan of “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” — was begun by the Student Union of the Law School of the Ottoman University (today’s Istanbul University). The campaign gained momentum in the early thirties and lasted throughout the 1940s.
The country was covered with signs that repeated this edict. Turkish youths warned minorities to speak Turkish. The message further spread into the mass media and political circles. Those who did not comply were threatened, beaten, or brought to court. Hundreds were reportedly arrested for speaking languages other than Turkish, or had fines imposed.
Committees were established throughout Turkey; posters of “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” were hung in public places and all citizens were urged to speak Turkish. In the city of Edirne, the campaign was conducted by Turkish students in an even more severe and antisemitic way. Jews were told that those who did not speak Turkish could not live a comfortable life or would be driven out of the country. As scholar Sarah Miriam Moehr notes:
Though there were many communities in Turkey that spoke languages other than Turkish (Kurds, Cretans, Arabs, Armenians, Albanians and Assyrians, among others) and that were threatened, fined and arrested for not speaking Turkish in public, Jews were the campaigners’ prime target.
In 1927, 85 percent of the Jews in European Turkey spoke Ladino as their mother tongue and Jews made up more than 10% of Izmir’s population. There were mainly two reasons for the targeting of Jews who spoke Ladino and/or French. One was to curb their economic power and the other possibly to force Turkish Jews to take a clear stand and to either become indistinguishably Turkish or to choose ‘otherness’ and leave.
While Turkish nationalism treats Turkey’s Jewish citizens as perpetual outsiders, history tells a radically different story. Jews are not guests in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey); they are among its oldest stewards. Centuries before the first Turkic horsemen crossed into Anatolia in the eleventh century, and long before the rise of Islam, thriving Jewish communities had already established roots across Anatolia.
Jews lived continuously in Asia Minor from Biblical times, mentioned by Aristotle and several Roman sources, including Josephus. Yet, Turkification policies and relentless pressure created a hostile environment that catalyzed Jewish emigration and pushed Ladino to the brink of dying out.
Today, Christians and Jews account for a mere 0.1 percent of Turkey’s population — a staggering demographic collapse engineered by decades of discriminatory state policies.
In 1934, Jews in eastern Thrace were exposed to a pogrom. From 1941 to 1942, Turkey enlisted all Christian and Jewish males in the military, including the elderly and mentally ill. They were forced to work under horrendous conditions in labor battalions. Many lost their lives or caught diseases during their service. In 1942, a wealth tax was imposed to eliminate Christians and Jews from the economy. In 1955, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were targeted through a pogrom in Istanbul. In 1964, the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey led to an exodus of around 30,000 people. All of the above contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Christians and Jews in the country.
At the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the country’s Jewish population stood at 81,454, with 47,035 residing in Istanbul — accounting for roughly 13% of the city's total population of 373,124.
In contrast, current estimates place Turkey's Jewish population at fewer than 15,000, with the vast majority concentrated in Istanbul, a metropolis now exceeding 15 million residents.
Jacob Ceki Hazan, a Jew from Izmir whose grandmother spoke Ladino, notes:
Ladino is more than just a language. It embodies the link between generations, families scattered across the four corners of the world, the invisible thread that connects the past and the future. It feeds my curiosity about my ancestors: how did they live? What were their daily routines, their rituals, their world?
Ladino… is the voice of memory, the warmth of home, the breath of continuity.
Meanwhile, a group of Jews from Turkey is championing the revival of this 500-year-old Judeo-Spanish language. It is a challenging task, as currently, the majority of Ladino's fluent speakers in Turkey are over the age of 70.
Declining demographic numbers within Turkey’s Jewish community have significantly reshaped its educational infrastructure, leaving the Istanbul-based Ulus Private Jewish Schools as the community’s sole remaining minority educational institution affiliated with the Turkish Ministry of National Education.
Decades of persecution — from massacres to discriminatory taxation and targeted violence — systematically erased Turkey’s historic Greek community as well. The 1960 census recorded 106,612 Orthodox Christians in Turkey. As of today, barely 2,000 to 2,500 Greeks remain in Istanbul or Constantinople, the city their ancestors built. According to a 2019 news report, only seven Greek schools remain in the country, and they are trying to survive with only 280 students.
Meanwhile, Kurdish, spoken by millions of Kurds in Turkey, is still not an official language in the country. Yet, millions of Kurds want Kurdish recognized as an official language.
In fact, several Kurdish municipalities implemented in 2004 a “multilingual municipal project.” The initiative was spearheaded by Abdullah Demirbas, the Kurdish mayor of the Sur District municipality of Diyarbakir.
As part of this project, many Kurdish-run municipalities offered public services, tourism brochures, cultural events, and signage in Kurdish, Aramaic (Assyrian/Syriac), Armenian, and English, alongside the official Turkish language. Some municipalities in southeast Turkey also included Persian and Arabic in this multilingual project.
Demirbas said that as mayor he sought to provide access for people using six languages: Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian, Hebrew, Arabic and English. The mayor emphasized Diyarbakir’s deep historical roots, noting that its rich heritage spans millennia and is shaped by 33 distinct cultures.
In 2007, Turkey’s supreme administrative court (the Council of State) ordered the dismissal of Demirbas and dissolved Sur’s entire municipal assembly. The state prosecutor asserted that providing services in languages other than Turkish violated the Turkish Constitution and breached the Law on Turkish Characters.
Demirbas came under dozens of investigations on the grounds that he "violated the constitutional framework" by establishing a multilingual municipal service. He was brought to court for alleged offenses such as "abusing his position" and "violating the law on Turkish letters." He was also arrested over allegations of supporting terrorism. Demirbas was for years on trial for CDs, books, brochures, and magazines published in languages other than Turkish during his time in office.
Beginning in 2016, Turkey’s Ministry of the Interior seized Kurdish municipalities, ousted the elected co-mayors, and replaced them with state-appointed bureaucrats (known as trustees).
Those state-appointed trustees and regional authorities then systematically closed the multilingual frameworks as a "national security measure." They scrubbed Kurdish from the websites of those municipalities, removed multilingual welcome signs, closed minority language support centers, and replaced bilingual street signs with monolingual Turkish markers.
And that is how a local attempt at democratization was once again crushed by the Turkish state.
Consequently, modern-day Turkey has become a graveyard of dying languages. Its Greek, Armenian, Aramaic/Assyrian/Syriac, Laz, Ladino, and other languages risk extinction. The quiet extinguishing of Anatolia’s indigenous tongues is no natural evolution — it is state-driven erasure.
When a language dies, we do not just lose words. We lose a vital archive of human experience, memory, and unique ways of seeing the world. The death of a language is the violent destruction of history itself.
In Anatolia, native voices are not merely fading into the past; they are systematically silenced.
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