INTRODUCTION
Background and overview
Over the past two decades, language in society research has outlined the myriad ways in which post-modern transnationalism—in the forms of increased mobility (cf. Coupland Reference Coupland2010), neoliberalism (cf. Heller Reference Heller2003), and digital connectivity (cf. Jacquemet Reference Jacquemet2005) among others—has informed reconceptualizations of identity and ideology, prompting the call to re-envision sociolinguistics as inextricably embedded within the constraints and affordances of globalization (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010). The first two years of the Covid era, which oversaw the widespread implementation of stringent immigration control policies and heightened attention to the ever-evolving local pandemic situation, presented an apparent challenge to this paradigm through its cessation of mobility. The inward perspective fostered by these dynamics, coupled with the enhanced powers of the state through Covid restrictions (Appadurai Reference Appadurai2020), suggests that the often competing influences of the nation-state and transnationalism over language, identity, and ideology merit renewed attention.
The borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey—the four principal nation-states that have jurisdiction over the traditional Kurdish homeland—divide the Kurdish nation and render its shared language pluricentric. Within this context, transnational orientations may unify Kurds who identify as members of the Kurdish nation, but local sociopolitical realities retain their influence. As minority status marks the Kurdish experience, Kurdish ethnocultural belonging has developed under the constraints of structures that have excluded, erased, and, in many cases, specifically targeted symbols of Kurdish culture. Within this context, the periodic banning and devaluation of public Kurdish-language use across the four nation-state settings has drawn specific attention to language. Such measures have increased the salience of Kurdish through the years, both as a mark of stigma and low status on the one hand and, on the other, a focal point of identity politics and resistance among politically engaged Kurds.
Of the four nations, Turkey has historically implemented some of the most extreme and longest sustained measures to assimilate its Kurdish-speaking population (Cf. Fernandes Reference Fernandes2012), contributing to numerous local settings in which language salience is key to understanding speakers’ open deployment, or lack thereof, of Kurdish linguistic resources. Deeply monolingual, monocultural conceptualizations of Turkish national identity have informed policy (cf. Çoşkun, Derince, & Uçarlar Reference Çoşkun, Derince and Uçarlar2011), and their framing within nation-state discourses remains highly resonant in today's Turkey despite the effects of migration and neoliberalism (Schluter Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a). In this way, the relatively recent suspension of Turkish laws that historically prohibited speaking Kurdish has not profoundly affected practice due to these laws’ conformity with linguistic culture in the Schiffmanian (Reference Schiffman1996) sense.
Embedded within this context, the case of language policy at a Kurdish-owned eating establishment in Istanbul, presented here, provides a look into the constraints of nationally and locally prominent discourses that compete with transnational orientations of Kurdish belonging. Through this analysis, transcultural capital (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2009) emerges as a means of legitimizing ideologically driven articulations of a stigmatized but pluricentrically oriented minority identity.
In contrast to the more benign—and often commodifiable—status of some other minority language contexts (cf. Heller Reference Heller2003; Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, & Rieder Reference Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Rieder, Hogan-Brun and O'Rourke2019), Kurdish in Turkey largely retains its deep ties to Kurdish political causes and their perceived threat to Turkish conceptualizations of national belonging (cf. Çoşkun et al. Reference Çoşkun, Derince and Uçarlar2011). For this reason, the stakes for accurately calculating the perceived costs and benefits of Kurdish language usage within a given domain are particularly high. At the workplace, the potential to offend Turkish customers by exposing them to Kurdish has contributed to managers’ views of Kurdish-language inclusive policies as risky, largely relegating the language to Goffmanian (Reference Goffman1959) back-stage contexts (Schluter & Sansarkan Reference Schluter, Sansarkan, Içduygu and Göker2014; Schluter Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a). These findings suggest the dominance of sociopolitical structure over individual language choice (Schluter Reference Schluter2020). The analysis presented in this article builds off of this previous work by addressing an apparent exception: a revenue-generating kebab restaurant that conspicuously incorporates Kurdish into the soundscape of its dining room. For a comparative perspective, it also draws on data from a different Kurdish-run café that pays a heavy price for its highly audible construction of Kurdish identity. By examining identity construction, ideological attachments, and economic capital as three interdependent aspects of workers’ investment (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2015) in Kurdish vs. Turkish-language usage at the workplace, this study provides insights into the dynamics that allow one business to thrive in spite of its flagrant violation of the no-Kurdish language policy that local Kurdish managers commonly deem necessary to maintain clientele (Schluter & Sansarkan Reference Schluter, Sansarkan, Içduygu and Göker2014; Schluter Reference Schluter2020, Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a).
The invisibilization of Kurdish under the influence of the Turkish state
As mentioned above, exclusionary Turkish nationalist discourses have long fostered negative attitudes toward ethnic minority languages spoken in Turkey. While laws that forbid Kurdish have diminished in the past decade, the stigma directed specifically at audible presentations of Kurdish cultural belonging has intensified (Ergin Reference Ergin2014). Relevant to the current study, an important component of this stigma lies at the intersection of social class and race, accounting for common stereotypes about Kurds as disruptors of urban life among middle-class Turks (Saraçoğlu Reference Saraçoğlu2010). In the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, such stigma has deepened with state-led campaigns to eliminate disruptors (Schluter Reference Schluter2021b).
This environment has contributed to the practice of hiding Kurdishness—including accents in spoken Turkish (Polat & Schallert Reference Polat and Schallert2013; Schluter Reference Schluter2021c)—in public domains. The widespread invisiblization of Kurdish from public view has resulted (Haig Reference Haig, Concerman and Haig2004; Schluter & Sansarkan Reference Schluter, Sansarkan, Içduygu and Göker2014). Kurdish speakers’ common use of Turkish to address other Kurds in public domains represents a profound legacy of these pressures. Moreover, on-going vigilante violence against speakers of Kurdish in public spaces (Dokuz Sekiz Haber 2020), committed in an attempt to preserve linguistic culture, compounds this effect.
Recognizing connections between the relegation of Kurdish to private domains and massive Kurdish-language attrition (Öpengin Reference Öpengin2012), Kurdish advocates have prioritized Kurdish-language maintenance and usage as tools of resistance to assimilationist pressures (Jamison Reference Jamison2016; Schluter Reference Schluter2019). Accordingly, speaking the language within earshot of customers at the jobsite, a domain typically reserved for Turkish, can arouse suspicion among Turkish customers that the speaker is verbally rejecting Turkish national identity (Schluter Reference Schluter2020, Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a). The audible usage of Kurdish at the workplace, analyzed below, lies at the intersection of each of these considerations.
The transnational Kurdish nation
In addition to the national and local structures described above, audible Kurdish-language use at the workplace can also be influenced by an important supra-national structure: the transnational Kurdish nation. Given its potential to affect perceptions of positionality, this scale merits special attention here. As the descendants of the children who sheltered in the mountains to escape the despotic Assyrian King Zahak, members of the Kurdish nationFootnote 1 are bound together through their attachments to common legends, founding myths, and histories. Moreover, the enhanced profile of the holiday, Newroz, which commemorates a Kurdish blacksmith's legendary overthrow of this king, has nurtured these attachments into fundamental aspects of the collective belonging of the Kurdish nation. Struggle represents a highly resonant theme, and oppression by a dominant power that seeks to erase Kurdishness is deeply familiar. Rooted in the legacy of this struggle against oppression, the consciousness of the present-day Kurdish nation has developed in juxtaposition to Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, and Turkish nationalism (Mahmod Reference Mahmod2016).
Engagement with this struggle, too, guides advocacy work to support Kurdish rights across the historical homeland, illustrating the capacity to unify geographically dispersed Kurdish factions and shed ties to the nation-states indicated on their birth certificates (Demir Reference Demir2017). Transcending territorial boundaries and state-issued documentation differences, the Kurdish nation, thus, refers to a deeply interconnected entity that brings together Kurds residing in the homeland and the diaspora, many of whom orient to sovereign Kurdish territories, real or aspirational (Mahmod Reference Mahmod2016). While rifts between different Kurdish populations received considerable attention in earlier literature, work carried out in the past decade has highlighted the growth of pan-Kurdish cultural orientations (cf. Sheyholislami Reference Sheyholislami and Sheyholislami2011). This article focuses in particular on employees and managers of two Istanbul eateries who subscribe to these orientations, envisioning themselves as members of a transnational people that is distinct from the Turks with whom they share citizenship.
Theoretical grounding
The history described above features the ‘amplification’ and ‘silencing of voices’, which lie at the heart of Darvin & Norton's (Reference Darvin and Norton2015) model of investment (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2021:32). Although the concept of investment was developed to conceptualize language usage by language learners, its emphasis on power structures is well suited for the current look at Kurdish speakers who, in parallel with the model, seek legitimacy to speak a language in the face of marginalization. Given the limited agency of Kurdish managers to implement Kurdish-friendly language policies (Schluter Reference Schluter2020), the focus of investment on the contributing factors to the agency-structure debate provides a highly relevant analytical perspective. Investment draws on the intersecting influences of identity, ideology, and capital (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2015), which, accordingly, frame the three-pronged analysis and interpretation of the data that ultimately address participants’ capacity to ‘claim their right to speak’ in front of customers (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2021:32).
The geographical expanse of Greater Kurdistan, a territory that covers approximately 320,000 kilometers (Dahlman Reference Dahlman2002), has, together with the traditionally locally centric orientations of Kurdish communities, contributed to the emergence of different Kurdish-language varieties. Moreover, the division of the Kurdish nation by state borders has resulted in additional linguistic differences. With speakers who envision themselves as a unified people, however, the Kurdish language constitutes a superordinate term that includes each of these varieties (Hassanpour, Sheyholislami, & Skutnabb-Kangas Reference Hassanpour, Sheyholislami and Skutnabb-Kangas2012; Sheyholislami Reference Sheyholislami and Alicja Jańczak2018). Furthermore, according to recent conceptualizations of pluricentricity (cf. Kaltenegger Reference Kaltenegger2020), this understanding of Kurdish as a unified language across linguistic differences and territorial boundaries indicates its status as a single pluricentric language. Recognition of this aspect of a language can contribute to a re-evaluation of its status as determined by the language policies of individual nations (Dollinger Reference Dollinger2019). Indeed, in the case of Kurdish, de jure and de facto policies relegate Kurdish to a minoritized, regional position within Turkey; however, an understanding of the language's use for international communication and its official, state-recognized status in Northern Iraq (aka Free Kurdistan) effectively raises its profile.
Attention to the regional, national, and international standing of Kurdish brings to the fore the relevance of scales in the tradition of Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouk (Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005). On the national scale, monolingual, monocultural ideologies act to elevate the status of Turkish and diminish the prestige of Kurdish. Widening the scope beyond both of these two scales, a transnational perspective—embodied here through attachments to the Kurdish nation—provides a more critical distance from these ideologies. Such scalar considerations highlight competing ideologies as push and pull factors that inform the incorporation—or conscious omission—of politically salient languages into publicly accessible domains (Piller Reference Piller, Tracy, Ilie and Sandel2015). In addition to the influence of ideology, the use of a language in such marked contexts as restaurant dining rooms—in line with an understanding of identity as socially constructed (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005)—also functions as an expression of identity.
With its direct ties to power (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Thompson1991), capital brings legitimacy to language. The focus of this article on language use at the workplace, which relies on customers’ patronage to remain in business, suggests that economic capital—relative to other forms of capital—merits special attention. This specified focus is further grounded in analyses of the sociolinguistic dynamics of Kurdish in Turkey, which directly connect the absence of economic capital with its lack of perceived value among many of Turkey's Kurdish speakers, resulting in attrition (Öpengin Reference Öpengin2012). Combining the workplace setting and this ethnolinguistic focus, findings that suggest Kurdish-Turkish bilingual workers’ preference for practical linguistic solutions over symbolic uses of Kurdish when confronted with economic survival (Leinonen Reference Leinonen2020) further inform this article's emphasis on economic capital over other forms of capital.
As the current post-modern era has loosened dominant cultures’ and nation-states’ grips on economic capital, it has become more dispersed (cf. Duchêne & Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2012), including among migrants and minority groups (Sabaté i Dalmau Reference Sabaté i Dalmau, Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts2013). This greater dispersion also grants a more influential role to transcultural capital (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2009). In these ways, the current system provides increased opportunities for Kurdish ownership of economic capital and, subsequently, the enhanced legitimacy of the language.
Spaces for Turkish and Kurdish in Taksim eating establishments: Findings from a previous study as a starting point
In spite of these new openings for minority and migrant-owned businesses, the political economy of Kurdish in Turkish-dominant settings has largely prompted Kurdish-owned businesses to hide their Kurdish cultural attachments from their customers (Schluter Reference Schluter, Kamp, Kaya, Keyman and Onursal-Beşgül2014, Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a). A closer look at this trend, however, uncovers variables that point to the need for a more nuanced analysis. One of these variables includes the proximity of the eating establishment to the İstiklal Pedestrian Zone of Taksim, Istanbul's top revenue-generating district for entertainment and leisure among middle-class Turks. Specifically, the venues located closer to the İstiklal Pedestrian Zone tend to implement language policies that—despite their Kurdish ownership and management—more strictly restrict Kurdish in spaces accessible to customers relative to similar eating establishments located farther away (Schluter Reference Schluter2020). Given the need for İstiklal businesses to cater to middle-class Turks, the origins of such policies align with previous research that highlights the salience of social class in formulating racial stereotypes about Kurds (Saraçoğlu Reference Saraçoğlu2010), suggesting its continued relevance to the current research setting.
With its location near İstiklal and its Kurdish-inclusive language policy, The Kurdish café, Tahmasp, violates this pattern. As outlined below, this violation is directly tied to the café's failure to attract and maintain sufficient business to cover its operating costs. Given the salience of relative location to the findings from the previous study, the İstiklal Pedestrian Zone serves as a reference point for the two eating establishments discussed here.
Profiles of Tahmasp and Chef Nuso: Two Kurdish-run eating establishments of Taksim with Kurdish-inclusive language policies
Tahmasp,Footnote 2 a small Kurdish-owned and operated café/restaurant, is located on the second floor of a building on a side street off of İstiklal. Although it does not lie directly on İstiklal, it is situated among businesses that cater primarily to the middle-class Turkish clientele and international tourists who frequent businesses on the pedestrian zone. Indeed, many such customers have wandered into Tahmasp with the mistaken assumption that it is a Turkish café. Upon discovering its Kurdish cultural orientation—discernable through, among other evidence, its Kurdish-Turkish bilingual menu, its owner's easy bilingualism when addressing customers, and the inclusion of Kurdish-language media in its magazine rack—some of these customers, according to observations and the owner's interview data, stand up and abruptly leave the café. Some do so angrily; others do so silently. The outdoor sign for Tahmasp has been torn down with such frequency that it is unusual to find it standing, greatly diminishing the likelihood that new patrons who seek it will find it. All but a few loyal customers never return. With its low level of patronage, Tahmasp faces dim prospects for economic survival.
In contrast to the local setting of Tahmasp, Chef Nuso is located next to a red-light district on a busy thoroughfare that separates Taksim from Tarlabaşı, a traditionally low-rent district that is infamous for crime and shady dealings carried out by members of stigmatized minority communities. While gentrification during the past decade has raised rents and altered the district's demographic profile, the continued presence of marginalized groups in this area deters many of the middle-class Turks who frequent similar kebab shops on or near İstiklal from venturing into the area, underlining some freedom to enact policy that is less influenced by middle-class Turks’ stereotypes of Kurds. Indeed, Nuso and his employees estimate that less than twenty percent of their customers can be classified as middle-class Turks; furthermore, approximately seventy percent of their customers are Kurdish, many of them from Northern Iraq. Unlike Tahmasp, Chef Nuso functions at or near capacity during most of the peak lunch and dinner hours. In addition, it serves a steady flow of customers seeking to satisfy late-night kebab cravings. Chef Nuso has recently had to employ two more cooks and servers to accommodate the high customer demand.
In these ways, Chef Nuso and Tahmasp, two businesses that break with the established language policies that keep Kurdish invisible to customers, present contrasting pictures in terms of location and profit. This contrast, which defies their similar approach, prompts inquiry into the reasons for which Tahmasp is subjected to a business-crushing, anti-Kurdish backlash that does not affect Chef Nuso.
Research question
Analysis draws on investment to examine the perceived risks and benefits of workplace language policies that, departing from the majority of Kurdish-run businesses in the area, allow incorporation of Kurdish into the dining room soundscape. Given its apparent immunity from the business-threatening pressures to hide Kurdish from customers that afflict nearby Kurdish-run eating establishments, Chef Nuso represents the primary research site addressed in the forthcoming discussion. For a comparative perspective, analysis also reflects on the guiding ideologies, language practices, and economic viability of Tahmasp, which, although vulnerable to these pressures, still attempts to resist them. These considerations foreground the study's guiding question:
In which ways do tenets of investment—namely identity construction, ideology, and economic capital—allow workers at Chef Nuso to violate the norms of local workplace language policy without suffering the negative consequences that have emerged at Tahmasp?
RESEARCH METHODS
This article draws on data collected as part of a follow-up study about the use of Kurdish and Turkish in customer-accessible vs. customer-inaccessible spaces at eleven of Taksim's Kurdish-owned eating establishments. In line with Holmes & Stubbe's (Reference Holmes and Stubbe2015) workplace data collection procedures, recordings of workplace interactions, observations, and interviews provided complementary data sources. A portable digital recorder controlled by the employees themselves captured their naturalistic interactions over a one to two-hour period during peak working hours. Following analysis of the resulting transcripts according to parameters set out in Li Wei (Reference Wei and Auer1998), all participants took part in semi-structured interviews that addressed: (i) the patterns of Kurdish and Turkish language usage that emerged in the transcript data, and (ii) workplace language policies and practices. The researchers took notes during the interviews, and the Kurdish research assistant helped with translation as needed. Participants could speak Kurdish if they preferred; however, interviews took place primarily in Turkish, the participants’ and both researchers’ shared language. Observations of each research site lasted between seven and ten hours, allowing opportunities to monitor a range of customers and diverse interaction patterns during different times of the work day/night.
Thirty-six maleFootnote 3 native speakers of Kurmanji KurdishFootnote 4 working at the selected eating establishments in Taksim contributed data to the larger study. All participants were (Kurmanji) Kurdish-Turkish bilinguals who could use both languages to discuss a range of topics, including the details of customers’ orders; however, their actual levels of Turkish-language communicative competence varied.
Employing a ‘friend of a friend’ approach to recruitment (Milroy Reference Milroy1980), the follow-up case study presented here replicated these data collection procedures over a three-month period at Chef Nuso and Tahmasp. The extracts featured in the analysis below come from interviews with two of Chef Nuso's employees: Nuso and İbrahim. They are brothers who grew up together in Mardin and migrated to Istanbul thirteen years prior to the study. At age twenty-four, Nuso is younger than İbrahim, who is twenty-six years old. As the restaurant's manager, however, Nuso holds authority over İbrahim, who serves as a grill master and cook.
Tahmasp's owner and manager, Şerif, is twenty-six years old. Although born in Istanbul, he maintains strong ties to his parents’ hometown of Şırnak. Unlike the rest of the participants in the study, he considers his work as a writer as his primary profession. He envisions the sociocultural aspects of running Tahmasp as material to inform his writing. As financial profit does not represent its primary aim, his café stands out from the other Kurdish workplaces in the larger study by prioritizing cultural capital over economic capital.
By providing a glimpse into the patterns of Kurdish and Turkish language use in the kitchen and dining room settings, the corpus of recorded workplace interactions at Chef Nuso help to triangulate the interview data, which represent the primary focus of this article. Adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005), analysis of the interview transcripts targeted micro, meso, and macro-level discourse features. Specific emphases included instances of stance taking, presupposition, and relationality (distinction) with respect to emergent themes.
In line with the socially constructed nature of identity intrinsic to investment (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2015), the forthcoming analysis considers the context through which identity emerges as fundamental to its discursive form (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005). Interviews serve as participants’ principal means of constructing identity in this study, drawing attention to the influential role of the interviewer-interviewee relationship. Interpretations of participants’ comments, therefore, take into account participants’ perceptions of the interviewers, one of whom is a male, Kurdish research assistant from Turkey's Southeast and the other, a female American researcher with ties to an Istanbul academic institution.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Open expressions of Kurdish identity at the kebab shop
Recalling the previous study, the managers of centrally located kebab shops outlined in Schluter (Reference Schluter2020) recognize the structures that render Kurdish largely invisible at their workplaces. Transcript and observation data from this study, however, suggest that this subtlety does not extend to Kurdish-language use at Chef Nuso.
Observations and recordings of Chef Nuso's kitchen reveal workplace communication that takes place primarily in Kurdish (i.e. as the matrix language) with frequent instances of lexical borrowing and occasional cases of intra-sentential code-switching in Turkish. Shifting pragmatic functions and topics help to account for much of the emergent patterns, revealing a complex picture of multilingualism in action. The analysis of kitchen language practices outlined in Schluter & Sansarkan (Reference Schluter, Sansarkan, Içduygu and Göker2014) unpacks some of this complexity with respect to other Kurdish-owned area businesses, and space limitations do not allow for similar depth here. The example below highlights a brief exchange between Chef Nuso's kitchen employees as they discuss a customer's order. The utterances occur primarily in Kurdish, but Turkish translations (displayed in bold in parentheses) indicate a close relationship with Turkish.
This short dialogue demonstrates the use of Kurdish in the kitchen to discuss the primary topic of the workplace: food. Lines 3 and 4 contain words that have been spelled in Kurdish but could be borrowed from Turkish or vice versa. As the Kurdish and Turkish versions of these words are quite similar, the boundary between the two languages—and the tendency for lexical borrowing—can be quite blurry. Such blurriness characterizes much of the lexicon of food-focused discussions, even when the conversation seemingly occurs primarily in Kurdish.
Chef Nuso's dining room features a higher number of Turkish-language utterances relative to the kitchen; however, Kurdish also represents a consistently audible part of the soundscape, accounting for approximately 40–60% of the employees’ utterances, depending on the presence/absence of customers, the topics of discussion, and individual language preferences. During peak working hours when interactions revolve around customers’ orders, such exchanges as the one that appears below occur often. It addresses the same topic as in example (1) (above), providing an illustrative comparison between kitchen and dining room contexts. Also similar to (1), regular font indicates Kurdish-language utterances, and bold font indicates Turkish-language utterances.
In the above interaction between the waiter and the grillmaster, Turkish and Kurdish both serve important functions. Turkish is the language of the customer's order. Lines 1–3 show indirect quotes of this order, which, accordingly, also take place in Turkish. Line 4 shows a request for clarification, resulting in a shift to Kurdish, the two workers’ shared native language, in line 5. In line 6, Kurdish is also used for the more private aside, which changes the topic to gossip. Although the two examples presented here cannot reflect the nuances of the larger kitchen and dining room corpora, they, nevertheless, illustrate the increased tendency to use Turkish to discuss orders in the dining room rather than the kitchen. When comparing these findings with those of dining room vs. kitchen language practices in previous Kurdish restaurant studies (i.e. Schluter & Sansarkan Reference Schluter, Sansarkan, Içduygu and Göker2014; Schluter Reference Schluter2020), the dining room setting of Chef Nuso stands out for its significantly higher frequency of audible Kurdish. Interview data indicate employees’ awareness of this difference, suggesting that Kurdish-language infusion into dining room interactions represents an intentional aspect of the language policy at Chef Nuso.
For a look at this intentionality vis-à-vis an employee's stance and discursive construction of language policy and practice at Chef Nuso, İbrahim's interview comments provide some useful insight. As extract (3) below shows, he displays open resistance to the common policy of forbidding Kurdish in customer-accessible spaces.
Given common associations between Kurdish and subversion, local residents have warned Chef Nuso employees to refrain from speaking this language within earshot of customers lest it deter customers and/or compromise Chef Nuso's reputation (line 1). Indeed, the previous study highlighted a common tendency for restaurants that audibly construct their Kurdish identities to be labeled as funders of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which the Turkish government considers a terrorist group. Nevertheless, İbrahim adopts a defiant stance against these warnings, indicating that he is willing to take the risks associated with exposing customers to Kurdish and, by extension, demonstrating ideologies that may be perceived as anti-Turkish (line 2). Referencing the political developments that have removed a number of the official prohibitions on Kurdish in recent decades, he envisions diminished negative repercussions—including no perceived threat to the restaurant's income—that may result from his language practice (lines 2–3).
With the evaluative expression saçma ‘ridiculous’ (line 4), he expands his defiant stance to Turkish-only workplace language policies in general. He justifies his stance by pointing to an implicit double standard with respect to foreign tourists. As a Turkish-only dining room, language policy should theoretically apply equally to venues with all different types of customers; it should not discriminate between the languages used to serve Kurdish and foreign customers (lines 4–5). Given Turkish waiters’ very common practice of receiving foreign customers in English, İbrahim reasons—quite logically—that it is difficult to justify the simultaneous penalization of Kurdish that fulfills the same function.
İbrahim reiterates his stance by insisting that he would continue to serve Kurdish-speaking customers in Kurdish in the hypothetical situation that Chef Nuso were located directly on İstiklal (lines 6–8). With this shift of setting from the periphery to one that caters to more middle-class Turks, İbrahim acknowledges the higher risks of workplace Kurdish-language use in front of a customer demographic associated with high rates of race and social class-based stereotypes of Kurds (Saraçoğlu Reference Saraçoğlu2010). In doing so, he strengthens his discursive construction of himself as an individual who refuses to compromise his firmly held beliefs to accommodate potential customers’ assimilationist ideologies.
This hypothetical claim functions as an intensifier of his bold opposition to a Turkish-only language policy. As the example of Tahmasp shows, however, İbrahim's relegation of lost business for open Kurdish-language use to the dustbins of history is incorrect: Kurdish retains its capacity to inflict considerable damage on business. Given the constructed nature of identity (Bucholz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005), it is unclear whether a shift in interlocuter from the interviewees to Kurdish patrons at an İstiklal business would, in line with İbrahim's account, actually elicit Kurdish-language reception. It is quite possible that the altered context may stimulate the emergence of a different identity. The point of greatest clarity here, in fact, is İbrahim's stance on this matter.
In our interview with Nuso, he, too, acknowledges the conscious decision to use Kurdish in customer-accessible spaces; furthermore, he indicates that language practice serves as a means of preserving Kurdish cultural identity. His comments help to contextualize his allowance of Kurdish at Chef Nuso as part of a guiding ideology. In extract (4) below, he contrasts this aspect of Chef Nuso with that of other Kurdish-run eateries in the Taksim area.
With his reference to ‘all of them’ who ‘are not like us’ (line 1), Nuso constructs his and his employees’ shared identity in juxtaposition to businesses run by other Kurds, which he envisions as far more assimilated to Turkish cultural expectations. Nuso, thus, situates his employees and himself in a small minority of Kurdish restaurant workers whose commitment to preserving Kurdish identity informs their business practices (lines 1–2). According to this framing, the use of Kurdish in front of customers at Chef Nuso represents an audible mark of distinction (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984), which sets this restaurant apart from most other Kurdish-run eating establishments, whose owners and managers lack the courage to allow Kurdish into its soundscape.
Both İbrahim's stance and Nuso's positioning, displayed for the researchers within the micro-level context of the interview, draw on a common trope associated with the macro-level, transnational Kurdish nation described in the introduction: Kurds’ shared resistance to dominant populations that have historically sought to assimilate them (Kren Reference Kren, Kreyenbroek and Allison1996). The resistance to Turkish cultural assimilation through the marked use of Kurdish at the workplace represents a highly resonant means of articulating membership within this ingroup, both to other Kurds and the researchers themselves, whose research interests suggest a shared orientation toward the Kurdish nation.
The presupposition that language choice indexes a speaker's assimilationist/non-assimilationist orientation grounds both extracts (3) and (4), reflecting language ideologies’ dominance over language practice and the tendency for language choice to fulfill primarily social aims (Piller Reference Piller, Tracy, Ilie and Sandel2015:4). As a result of its association with a political movement, code choice remains a strong index of ethnolinguistic identity (Heller Reference Heller, Milroy and Muysken1995; McGill Reference McGill2013), and discourses of ethnocultural essentialism tend to feature prominently (Muehlmann & Duchêne Reference Muehlmann, Duchêne and Heller2007).
This is especially the case for Kurdish. Indeed, the long history of attempts to silence Kurdish in its traditional homeland, coupled with a growing tendency to racialize its speakers (Ergin Reference Ergin2014), has contributed to the sustained relevance of ethnocultural essentialism among many Kurds who possess varying levels of Kurdish-language proficiency (Ekmekçi Reference Ekmekçi2011; Schluter Reference Schluter2019). In an era in which much of the sociolinguistics of multilingualism literature emphasizes the semiotic and extra-linguistic resources of communication (cf. Blommaert in Sherris & Adami Reference Sherris and Adami2019), the Kurdish language itself—with the full weight of its literary and reference texts (Jamison Reference Jamison2016)—functions as an enduring symbol of cultural belonging (Schluter Reference Schluter2019).
In this way, the audible construction of a Kurdish identity at Chef Nuso cannot be separated from the ideologies to which much of the Kurdish nation subscribes. Accordingly, the discussion now turns from identity to this second component of investment: ideology.
The influence of ideology: Orienting to the Kurdish nation through language policy and practice
Building off of the socially and linguistically constructed nature of identity, a shift in focus to ideology lends itself to the analysis of another important aspect of investment vis-à-vis Chef Nuso's and Tahmasp's language policies. While the preceding discussion places primary attention on interview and observation data from Chef Nuso, the data collected from Şerif (Tahmasp's owner) indicate a similarly bold rejection of workplace language policy norms through the conspicuous use of Kurdish. Moreover, this language policy—also in line with that of Chef Nuso—is grounded in the vision of Kurdish-language use at the workplace as part of the larger sociocultural project for which the Kurdish nation advocates.
The following interview data from Şerif offers a closer look at this ideology that he shares with İbrahim and Nuso. In an effort to avoid overlapping analyses, only Şerif's interview data receive attention here. Analysis of his comments shed light on the scalar mechanisms that allow this ideology to override the pressures of structures that make the managers of other İstiklal-area, Kurdish-run eating establishments feel obliged to project monolingual Turkish identities in front of customers (Schluter Reference Schluter2020).
Before addressing these comments, some background information is in order. As a former employee of a Kurdish-language publishing company, Şerif has gained a first-hand understanding of the existing market for Kurdish literary and cultural products, especially among Europe-based members of Kurdish diaspora groups. Inspired by examples of Kurdish positionalities—such as those of the publishing company's target customers—that have been forged beyond the confines of the national scale, his café represents a failed attempt to tap into this market in the local Istanbul context. This transnational orientation informs the ideologies that guide his workplace language practice. Serving as a local example of politicized entrepreneurship (Syrett & Yilmaz Keles Reference Syrett and Keles2019), the opening of Tahmasp mirrors the common practice among politicized members of Europe's Kurdish diasporas of integrating Kurdistan into the founding visions of their small businesses. In addition to his exposure to these transnational orientations of European-resident Kurds, Şerif also expands his understanding of Kurdish cultural belonging by engaging with the Kurdish language and cultural symbols of Northern Iraq/Free Kurdistan, which he discusses in extract (5) below.
Relational discourse features prominently in extract (5) above in which Şerif compares the sociopolitical climate of Northern Iraq/Free Kurdistan, which allows Kurdish identities to emerge freely vs. that of Turkey, which has long suppressed them through both de jure and de facto means. A lifetime of exposure to the structures that stigmatize Kurdish cultural belonging has heightened his awareness of the numerous Kurdish cultural symbols, such as the Kurdish flag, that are forbidden in Turkey but openly displayed in Northern Iraq (lines 1–2). Within this setting, the absence of the constraints on Kurdish language and cultural expression that are deeply familiar to Şerif stimulates his exuberant, highly audible outburst of Kurdish identity (line 2). Overcome by the excitement of experiencing this alternative society that stimulates a deep sense of belonging, Şerif calls his mother (line 3), a person with a similar positionality who can fully appreciate his unrestrained enthusiasm. In addition to reifying Şerif's cultural attachments, exposure to this example of a Kurdish-centric territory engenders feelings of ‘pride, trust, and security’ (lines 3–4), which he contrasts with the opposite emotions that develop upon his return to Turkey (line 5). As a reminder of the liberating influence of a territory that promotes—rather than marginalizes—Kurdish, he smuggles a Kurdish flag, the most salient symbol of Kurdish ethnonationalism, over the Turkish border (line 6). This celebration of Kurdishness, together with the deep emotions it invokes, lies at the heart of his founding vision of Tahmasp (lines 7-8), which also centers Kurdish language and culture.
Şerif's deep attachments to Free Kurdistan occur within the broader framing of Kurdishness espoused by the Kurdish nation, for whom this territory represents an important focal point (O'Leary, McGarry, & Salih Reference O'Leary, McGarry and Salih2005). Given the semi-autonomous status of the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq and the official recognition granted to Kurdish language on local and, as of 2005, national levels, this territory—together with the small Kurdish enclave of Rojava in Syria—constitutes the most permissive space for open Kurdish-language expression within the larger region dominated by autochthonous Kurds. Accordingly, the use of Kurdish across domains reserved for high status languages, including education and government administration, has increased its prestige, which is especially striking for those deeply familiar with the position of Kurdish within the other three major nation-states (i.e. Turkey, Iran, and Syria) of Kurdistan. For many members of the Kurdish nation, a Kurdish territory serves as a more appropriate point of reference than their state of origin that has systemically denied their cultural existence (cf. Mahmod Reference Mahmod2016:7). Free/Iraqi Kurdistan, thus, provides a territorial grounding for members of the Kurdish nation like Şerif.
As members of the Kurdish nation, Nuso and İbrahim share Şerif's reverence for Iraqi/Free Kurdistan; moreover, they, too, can draw on personal experience that heightens the resonance of this reverence. In their case, however, their Iraqi Kurdish clientele—rather than a visit to Northern Iraq/Free Kurdistan—effectively model the centering of Kurdish identity that has been constructed outside of the Turkish national context. Their exposure to this conceptualization—together with their Kurdish customers’ transcultural capital that will receive more attention in the section devoted to capital below—accounts for their capacity to envision Kurdish positionality beyond its marginalized status in Turkey.
This pluricentric orientation, thus, prompts Şerif, Nuso, and İbrahim to gain distance from a Turkey-specific positionality, allowing them to jump from the local and the national to transnational scales (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010). This perspective enables them to contextualize the structures that discourage Kurdish pride and trust within Turkey as well as identify the origins of these structures in Turkish nationalism. Operating outside of the full grip of these structures, Tahmasp and Chef Nuso can more easily adopt language policies that deviate from local norms.
In line with examples of other workplaces with language policies informed more by orientations to transnational rather than national and local scales, Tahmasp and Chef Nuso function as spaces of multilingualism (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005). Indeed, by conspicuously introducing Kurdish into customer-accessible domains, Tahmasp and Chef Nuso both increase the ‘public dispensability’ of Kurdish (Jamison Reference Jamison2015). Referring to the modeling of language use in the domains typically reserved for the prestigious dominant language, this action helps to fulfill an important political objective of the Kurdish nation: enhancing the language's perceived legitimacy.
The political resonance of this activity also influences its reception by customers, who vary considerably between the two businesses. With the conceptualization of a nation as ‘a means to dominate and, therefore, also as a means to resist’ (Heller Reference Heller, Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes2013:28), open orientations to a Kurdish nation within Istanbul's social heart may signify open resistance to Turkish ethnonationalism for the many Turks who subscribe to monolingual, monocultural understandings of Turkish identity. For this reason, the liberation of Kurdish identity expression that comes with its transnational orientation, unfortunately for Şerif, is perceived as a competitor of Turkish. Moreover, the centering of Kurdish culture implies the simultaneous peripheralization of Turkish culture.
With its location on the outskirts of the same district, Chef Nuso does not present a bold challenge to local understandings of Turkish-centric cultural belonging. Moreover, many of the middle-class Turks who frequent İstiklal do not venture to this side of Taksim, thereby reducing the likelihood of Kurdish-language usage at Chef Nuso offending them. As the following section details, the introduction of Kurdish-owned capital in this setting helps to account for the simultaneous viability of Kurdish-language use at Chef Nuso and its failure at Tahmasp.
The influence of Kurdish-owned capital
Building on the preceding subsections devoted to identity and ideology, discussion now turns to economic capital ownership, which represents a subcategory of the third component of investment (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2015). Space limitations, unfortunately, prevent detailed analysis of individuals’ ownership of different forms of capital, which also inform their investment.
The accumulation of economic capital relies on the capacity to attract and retain loyal customers. As mentioned previously, the different neighborhood settings of Chef Nuso and Tahmasp contribute to their varying levels of success toward this aim. In addition to allowing Chef Nuso to avoid the anti-Kurdish backlash that seriously threatens Tahmasp's viability as a business, the concentration of Kurds residing nearby has contributed to a demographically different clientele from that of more centrally located eating establishments like Tahmasp. These demographics, as İbrahim explains in extract (6) below, help to justify their language choices.
In addition to serving as a language for inter-employee communication, extract (6) indicates that employees also use Kurdish both to greet new Kurdish customers (line 1) and to retain existing customers (lines 2–3). For Iraqi Kurds, Chef Nuso employees’ shared ethnicity may not be readily apparent when they enter the restaurant (lines 4–5). The staff's Kurdish identity emerges through language, allowing Iraqi Kurdish customers to interact with them in their mother tongue (lines 6–7). As constructions of a shared Kurdish identity, these Kurdish-language exchanges represent a strategy for building a loyal customer base (line 8). With these words, İbrahim directly connects Kurdish-language service with increased patronage. This patronage leads to increased profits, highlighting the underlying relevance of economic capital with respect to language choices.
In addition to Chef Nuso's local Kurdish patrons, the large presence of Iraqi Kurdish customers highlights the important role of transcultural capital (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2009). As a product of its origins in transnational networks, this form of capital disrupts locally defined capital flow patterns, including Taksim-area businesses’ reliance on middle-class Turkish patronage for viability. Reflecting more diverse capital ownership under neoliberalism and the subsequent growth of businesses owned by non-elite groups (cf. Sabaté i Dalmau Reference Sabaté i Dalmau, Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts2013), this source of capital from Kurdish customers—of both Turkish and Iraqi national origins—grants such businesses as Chef Nuso greater legitimacy, strengthening the status of the languages associated with them as forms of linguistic capital (Vigouroux Reference Vigouroux, Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts2013). This fit within the new economy (cf. Duchêne & Heller Reference Duchêne and Heller2012), thus, fosters dynamics that both diminish the costs and enhance the rewards of audible Kurdish-identity construction in front of customers.
As dialect differences compromise easy comprehension between Chef Nuso employees and their Iraqi Kurdish customers, İbrahim's framing of Kurdish as a common language of communication for members of the same cross-border ethnic group is noteworthy: it illustrates the pull of the Iraqi Kurdish transnational network as a motivator for negotiating dialect differences and achieving mutual intelligibility. Furthermore, his engagement with this practice of accommodation (convergence) for members of his perceived ingroup aligns neatly with his attachment to the transnational Kurdish nation. At the same time, the financial profits of this approach cannot be ignored.
Reflecting this overlap between the language practices that simultaneously serve an ideology-driven and customer-centered approach, extract (7) below from Nuso's interview connects Kurdish-language proficiency with the multilingual competence that enhances employees’ capacity to cater to customers’ needs.
In extract (7) above, Nuso taps into the new economy's vision of service sector workers as bundles of skills (Urciuoli Reference Urciuoli2008), including linguistic skills (Lorente Reference Lorente2018), by pointing to multilingualism's intrinsic benefits to restaurant employees. In this way, Chef Nuso staff members’ ability to facilitate communication with customers directly increases/decreases their value as employees. The internalized presupposition that guides this understanding—namely the allocation of a language's relative value according to its potential to generate revenue within the marketplace—indicates the relevance of linguistic governmentality (Martín Rojo Reference Martín Rojo, Tollefson and Pérez-Milans2018), reflecting another common outcome of neoliberalism.
Given the prevalence of the discourses that foster linguistic governmentality in the current era, their existence in this context is only striking with consideration of their reference to Kurdish, a stigmatized language that results in financial loss at Tahmasp. With his adoption of such discourse that typically refers to the acquisition of dominant languages like English (cf. Hidalgo McCabe & Fernández-González Reference Hidalgo McCabe, Fernández-González, Rojo and Percio2019), Nuso places Kurdish-Turkish bilingualism on par with English-Turkish bilingualism. In doing so, Nuso disrupts the local linguistic culture that constructs bilingualism in Turkish and a dominant international language as valuable while attaching little worth to bilingualism in Turkish and a stigmatized minority language.
Guided by ideologies that emphasize the transnational character of Kurdish cultural belonging and are legitimized through local and transcultural capital, Nuso, in alignment with Kurdish-language advocacy work (Jamison Reference Jamison2016), discursively constructs Kurdish as commensurate with dominant languages like English. In contrast to Tahmasp and other centrally located Kurdish-run kebab shops in which Kurdish deters—rather than attracts—business (Schluter Reference Schluter2020, Reference Schluter, Gonçalves and Kelly-Holmes2021a), this support of ideology through capital ownership creates a front-stage space to express a deeply Kurdish identity. Although Şerif's language policy taps into the cultural capital of Kurdish, it fails to achieve legitimacy through economic capital. This analysis suggests that divergence between Tahmasp and Chef Nuso in terms of access to economic capital plays an important role vis-à-vis the viability of integrating Kurdish into dining room language policies.
CONCLUSION
Following Darvin & Norton (Reference Darvin and Norton2015)'s model of investment, each subsection of the preceding section has addressed participants’ workplace Kurdish language usage with respect to (i) identity construction, (ii) ideology, and (iii) economic capital. The examination of identity construction finds that defiance of Turkish cultural assimilation, together with the aim of preserving the mother tongue, motivates participants to build Kurdish into the workplace soundscape. In this way, ideology helps to inform identity expression; attachments to the Kurdish nation and Iraqi/Free Kurdistan, as one of its territorial embodiments, ground this ideology. In the case of Chef Nuso, these attachments further align with the demographic profile of customers: Iraqi Kurds’ loyal patronage highlights a case of economic capital accumulation through Kurdish-language service. The view from Tahmasp is quite different. As it has not established such a customer base, Kurdish language usage generates little identifiable profit and prevents it from gaining the contextual legitimacy that economic capital bestows upon it. Analysis of three key aspects of investment, thus, indicates substantial symmetry between the two settings in terms of identity and ideology and, simultaneously, considerable asymmetry with respect to economic capital.
The intersections between identity, ideology, and capital also provide useful insights into the perceived and articulated value of language (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2015). With respect to identity construction and ideology, participants’ orientation to a transnational scale offers a critical vantage point from which to examine their marginalization within Turkey. While Turkish cultural hegemony retains a strong hold over positionalities embedded within the national scale, this self-positioning as part of the larger Kurdish nation contributes to participants’ ability to jump scales (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010; Woolard Reference Woolard, Cornips and de Rooij2018), allowing for a bolder approach to Kurdish identity construction relative to those who lack this ideological foundation. Accordingly, ideologies grounded in this orientation can lead to the defiance of locally established linguistic culture, which, in parallel with other politically charged ethnolinguistic contexts (cf. Heller Reference Heller, Milroy and Muysken1995), hold salience as politically meaningful constructions of ethnolinguistic identity. In terms of participants’ perceived right to speak Kurdish at the workplace, these findings illustrate the roles of identity and ideology in stimulating ‘resist[ance] [to] positioning [oneself] as inadequate or unworthy’ despite membership in a stigmatized minority group (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2021:32).
As the counter-example of Tahmasp shows, however, an approach to language policy that is grounded in these ideologies only represents part of the equation. Successful implementation of these ideologies in the form of language practice also relies on economic capital. Although Şerif recognizes Kurdish as a form of cultural capital and prioritizes it over economic capital, his business is, nevertheless, subject to the same market forces that make Kurdish invisible in other eating establishments near İstiklal (profiled in Schluter Reference Schluter2020). Even for the Kurdish managers who, similar to Şerif, are ideologically driven to conspicuously articulate their Kurdish identity in the dining room, the prospects of business failure lead them to forbid Kurdish in the dining room. In this way, these results underline the importance of ‘be[ing] recognized by powerful others as legitimate speakers’ as an intrinsic aspect of investment (Darvin & Norton Reference Darvin and Norton2021:32). Powerful others, in this setting, come in two forms: (i) the middle-class Turks who lead the anti-Kurdish backlash at Tahmasp, which occupies a space typically reserved for establishments that cater to middle-class tastes, and (ii) the Kurdish-speaking customers of Chef Nuso, whose financial support bestows legitimacy upon Kurdish as a workplace language. At the same time, these findings highlight inextricable links between language, business location, and customers’ socioethnic orientations with respect to participants’ perceived right to speak Kurdish at the workplace.
By providing an example of a highly localized site in which economic capital enhances the prestige of Kurdish and creates a more permissive space for ideologically driven expressions of identity, these findings support previous work that emphasizes the traditionally capital-poor status of Kurdish as a key consideration when evaluating its sociolinguistic standing within Turkey-based research sites (Öpengin Reference Öpengin2012). Building on this claim, the results presented here suggest the importance of economic capital as a fundamental component of investment with respect to eating establishments with an audibly Kurdish soundscape. Given the origins of some of this capital in customers’ financial attachments to Free/Iraqi Kurdistan, transcultural capital (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2009) represents an integral part of this financial picture.
The example of Chef Nuso, discussed here, represents one business situated in the outskirts of Taksim that successfully defies the norms of workplace language policies that other businesses, such as Tahmasp, pay a high price for violating. Further research is needed to assess the extent to which these findings also apply to other Taksim-area, Kurdish-run businesses with similar profiles of identity, ideology, and economic capital. As Turkish customers’ social class represents an important consideration with respect to the negative images of Kurds that inform restrictive language policies in İstiklal-area businesses, this research will benefit from a design that mitigates the effects of social class. Given the relevance of other forms of individual-level capital to investment, the incorporation of social and cultural capital as key analytical considerations of this work will also strengthen its contribution to the literature on investment with respect to the Kurdish restaurants of Istanbul.
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