Özet:

The main target of the language question in Greek intellectual life, from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, is the invention of the national person. These arguments evolve around three axes: to prove that the Greek nation is the heir of the Ancient Hellenic culture, to prove that it has a European identity and to put the Greek irredentist project into effect. The language question that preceded the Greek national movement is about how to transfer European thought to the Greek community and how to prove the European identity of the Greeks to Europeans. Fundamentally all of these debates were based on a concept that was essentially created by the sovereign European discourse and cultivated in the sense of slavery-freedom. The Ottoman Empire was perceived as "slavery/yoke" by the 18th century Greek intelligentsia. It was necessary to get rid of this "yoke" as soon as possible. It was thought that education is salvation. The fierce debate at the end of the 19th century is predominantly about how the Greek Megali Idea can be realized. According to this discourse, Greece had Greeks who were outside the borders of the state since its establishment as a national state and were waiting for "rescue". While the intelligentsia was creating a common code with the Greeks of Anatolia over the Orthodox sect, it was trying to create another common code with the Orthodox population of the Balkans on the language. This second group was living in Macedonia, a region that is still troubled. At the end of the 19th century, Greek nationalism undertook the Greekization project of the Orthodox Christian people who lived here and spoke one of the Slavic languages as their mother tongue, by destroying other nationalism in the region. Thus they tried to create a common code in language. In this context, both the vernacularists and the archaists work to a common goal: to create Greeks from the people of this region. This paper will first focus on the language battle between the Greek speaking Orthodox Christian intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire. Then, it will study the language debates from the 1880s to the beginning of the 20th century.

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