Turkification
Today this region consists of mainly Turkic ethnic groups, barring Persian-speaking Tajiks, although centuries ago its native inhabitants were Iranian peoples.
[note 2][11] Mahmud al-Kashgari writes that the people who lived between Bukhara and Samarkand were Turkified Sogdians, whom he refers to as “Sogdak”.
[1] Turkification of the non-Turkic population derives from the Turkic settlements in the area now known as Azerbaijan, which began and accelerated during the Seljuq period.
[13] The migration of Oghuz Turks from present-day Turkmenistan, which is attested by linguistic similarity, remained high through the Mongol period, since the bulk of the Ilkhanate troops were Turkic.
In the northeast along the Black Sea these peoples eventually formed their own state known as the Empire of Trebizond, which gave rise to the modern Pontic Greek population.
In the east, near the borderlands with the Persian Empire, other native languages remained, specifically Armenian, Assyrian Aramaic, and Kurdish.
[18] Byzantine authorities routinely conducted large-scale population transfers in an effort to impose religious uniformity and quell rebellions.
These resettlements spread the Armenian-speaking community deep into Asia Minor, but an unintended consequence was the loss of local military leadership along the eastern Byzantine frontier, opening the path for the inroads of Turkish invaders.
[19] Beginning in the eleventh century, war between the Turks and Byzantines led to the deaths of many in Asia Minor, while others were enslaved and removed.
[22] The Turks seem to have been aware of their numerical inferiority during this time period as evidenced by the fact many Turkish rulers went to lengths to disarm their Christian subjects.
[23] Intermarriage between Turks and Greek, Armenian and Georgian natives of Anatolia was not unheard of, although the majority of these unions were between Turkish men and Christian women.
[29] They were then taught to speak Turkish and converted to Islam[30] with the primary objective of selecting and training the ablest children of the Empire for military or civil service, mostly into the ranks of the Janissaries.
[31] Started by Murad I as a means to counteract the growing power of the Turkish nobility, the practice itself violated Islamic law.
An attempt to re-institute it in 1703 was resisted by its Ottoman members who coveted its military and civilian posts, and in the early part of Ahmet III's reign, the practice was abolished.
The Ottoman Empire had an ethnically diverse population that included Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Bosniaks, Greeks, Persians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds, Zazas, Circassians, Assyrians, Jews and Laz people.
[33] One of its main supporters was sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp who believed that a modern state must become homogeneous in terms of culture, religion, and national identity.
[38] After the Young Turks assumed power in 1909, the policy of Turkification received several new layers and it was sought to impose Turkish in the administration, the courts, and education in the areas where the Arabic-speaking population was the majority.
Another aim was to loosen ties between the Empire's Turk and ethnically non-Turkish populations through efforts to purify the Turkish language of Arabic influences.
[39] Even before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Syrian Reformer Tahrir al-Jazairi had convinced Midhat Pasha to adopt Arabic as the official language of instruction at state schools.
Uğur Üngör writes that "Muslim Kurds and Sephardi Jews were considered slightly more 'Turkifiable' than others", noting that many of these nationalist era "social engineering" policies perpetuated persecution "with little regard for proclaimed and real loyalties."
[45] Additionally, non-Kurdish immigrants from Greece, Albania, Bosnia and Bulgaria were to be settled in the Diyarbakır province, where the deported Kurds had lived before.
After the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 displaced many of the Salonikan Jews and the Burning of Smyrna, the rebuilding of these places by the post-Ottoman Turkish and Greek nation-states devastated and erased the past of non-Turkish (and non-Hellenistic) habitation.
"[54] One of the goals of the establishment of the new Turkish state was to ensure "the domination of Turkish ethnic identity in every aspect of social life from the language that people speak in the streets to the language to be taught at schools, from the education to the industrial life, from the trade to the cadres of state officials, from the civil law to the settlement of citizens to particular regions.
[120][121] The imprecision of the appellation Türk can also be seen with other ethnic names, such as Kürt, which is often applied by western Anatolians to anyone east of Adana, even those who speak only Turkish.
In recent years, centrist Turkish politicians have attempted to redefine this category in a more multicultural way, emphasizing that a Türk is anyone who is a citizen of the Republic of Turkey.
[125] An earlier 2011 review had suggested that "small-scale, irregular punctuated migration events" caused changes in language and culture "among Anatolia's diverse autochthonous inhabitants," which explains Anatolian populations' profile today.
