Call for papers for a special issue of Diyâr 2028

100 Years of Script Reform in Turkey

On November 3, 1928, the Turkish Parliament decided to replace the Arabo-Persian script with a tailor-made variety of the Latin alphabet under the name of “Turkish alphabet” (Türk alfabesi). The newly introduced orthography was praised for its ‘shallowness’ (i.e., high tendency towards 1:1 correspondence of grapheme with phoneme), which was expected to accelerate the literalization of the society. 

Our special edition of Diyâr aims for an evaluation and analysis of the development of the “Turkish alphabet” as well as the discussion surrounding it. Such an enterprise is an interdisciplinary project. 

• The period of transition from the Arabo-Persian to the Latin script has to be considered in the context of the historical discourse of modernization, and this means both a critical analysis of the script-related discourse of modernization itself and a linguistic reflection on the potential (i.e., accessibility and consistency) of the new writing system vis-à-vis the old one, including also recent public debates surrounding alternatives to the Latin-based script.
• At the same time, the development of printing and literalization comes into view here, including the (changing/emerging) practices and approaches related to writing and reading and, in the newer decades, to digitalization, both on societal as well as on the individual levels.
• Third, the development of orthography based on the Latin-based writing system itself as a flexible linguistic system ought to become the subject of study.
• And fourth, the development of orthography is accompanied by a changeable discourse, which reveals itself both in spelling guides as well as in the public sphere and can also be interpreted on the foil of social identity formation. 

We expect papers which specifically address developmental issues, not necessarily covering the whole period of 100 years, but nevertheless specifically locating their topics within this.Through this, we expect to establish a coherence within the great diversity of our topic. We aim at a selection that reflects the breadth of the subject matter.

Please submit your abstract by May 31, 2026 to the editors via email (100yilharf@proton.me). The abstract should have approximately 5,000 characters including spaces, the proposed title as well as name and affiliation of the author(s) not counted.

Your article must not have been published elsewhere and should not exceed a total length of 60,000 characters (including spaces). Articles may be submitted in German, English or French. For Diyâr’s style-sheet please click here.

Timeline:

Deadline for submission of abstracts: May 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance/rejection by mid-July 2026
Deadline for submission of manuscript: April 30, 2027
Reviews by September 30, 2027
Revision by December 31, 2027
Submission of final manuscript by March 31, 2028
Publications of special issue: November 2028

Guest editors:

Ruth Bartholomä (Essen)
Astrid Menz (Istanbul)
Christoph Schroeder (Potsdam)