'Grip’ or ‘Paçavra Hastalığı’ – Language Change in the Turkish Health Sector?

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Bartholomä R., Başkavak C. G.

34. Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) – 100. Jahrestag, Berlin, Almanya, 12 - 17 Eylül 2022, ss.15

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Berlin
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Almanya
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.15
  • Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

“Grip” or “Paçavra Hastalığı” – Language Change in the Turkish Health Sector

Ruth Bartholomä, Gülşah Başkavak (Orient-Institut Istanbul, Türkei)

In 2012, the Turkish Ministry of Health reformed the compulsory patient instructions (Turk. prospektüs) for pharmaceuticals. Since then, there are two versions: one for health professionals, called “short product information” (Turk. kısa ürün bilgisi), and another for patients, called “direction for use” (Turk. kullanma talimatı). One of the declared goals was the use of an easier language in the second version, by “preparing them completely in Turkish and a colloquial language” by using as few Latin terms as possible (Medimagazin, September 21, 2012).

Two years later, the Turkish Language Society (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) published a dictionary of medication and pharmaceutical terms (İlaç ve Eczacılık Terimleri Sözlüğü), compiled since 2003 and containing approximately 12.000 terms. While certain terms in the definitions were defined as synonyms, not necessarily substitutions, in the media immediately appeared several articles claiming that the TDK wanted to substitute certain words by others, like ‘grip’ by ‘paçavra hastalığı’ (cf. Anadolu Ajansı, August 3, 2014).

This paper examines these developments from a language planning perspective, namely by attempting to answer Cooper’s (1989: 31) question: “Who plans what for whom and how?” After a look at the goals expressed by the initiators of the “leaflet reform” and the TDK dictionary as well as societal reactions reflecting different groups of actors, we investigate certain terms, taken from the TDK dictionary and traced in recent and older “directions for use”. Thus, the paper aims to answer the question how official language policies in Turkey exert an influence on the medical terminology.