However, his experiences prompted him to come back to İstanbul the following spring for a semester at Boğazici. It was during that time when he met and made friends with a variety of Turkic peoples for the first time, including students from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. This was the beginning of a new path for Kyle, who now studies language politics and power in Turkic republics. After graduating from Grinnell College in 2005, Marquardt became a Thomas J. Watson Fellow and received funding to pursue a year-long research project titled "The People's Fate: Language and Politics in Three Turkic States."
The following year he applied for and was awarded a position as a Fulbright Fellow to do research in the autonomous Republic of Tatarstan. Marquardt has done research in Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and various Turkic republics in the Russian Federation, including the autonomous Republic of Tatarstan. Marquardt will continue his studies in graduate school at Harvard University this fall. For him, "language is sort of a key to a culture."
In an interview in Istanbul, Today's Zaman asked Marquardt about his perceptions of the relationship between language, authority and culture in Turkey and these Turkic regions.
A recurring issue in Turkish media is its Turkish Language Association, formed in 1932 as part of the newly established Republic of Turkey's Kemalist reforms, with the purpose of purging Arabic and Persian elements from the language and replacing them with more "Turkish" equivalents. "I think that's an interesting thing, the idea that you can change a language, and I think it says a lot about what they try to do," Kyle says on the subject, adding: "In Turkey, they tried to remove the Arabic and Persian words in an attempt to make it -- as far as I understand -- not just more Turkish, but also less related to cultures that brought in the Arabic and the Persian. … So you can sort of tell what type of orientation the Turkish government was attempting at that time in their bringing in not only original Turkish words, but also a lot of French words."
Marquardt mentioned seeing similar movements in the other countries he studied. "In some of the Turkic countries that I've been in, there have been a lot of discussions about trying to establish something like that for their own languages. It differs country to country; in Turkmenistan they do have a language association very much like that, which is attempting to make Turkmen more like its original form. And in doing so, they're trying to come up with a lot of new words. … There was a big debate about how to name a 'whale' and what to call things like cake and pie. In the other countries, there are active movements to try to change their languages to a more original Turkish base, much as happened in Turkey."
Attempts at linguistic revival, purification and preservation do not always emanate from governmental authorities, as is the case in Turkey. The idea that a degree of a language's authenticity has been lost is commonly held in some Turkic regions and sometimes the people themselves are the main players attempting to affect the course of development of their language. "In Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and the other countries, they've had the same sort of influences as the Turkish language, so they have a lot of Persian and Arabic words, and they also had a lot of Russian words coming into the language," Marquardt says, "And so, whereas in Turkmenistan it's largely the government attempting to change the language to make it more pure, in other countries it's being given more to the people."
Marquardt stressed that it is very hard to generalize about any of these countries or their populations. When asked about differences in language usage along class, generational or religious lines, he notes: "In Azerbaijan I met a lot of youth who were attempting to change their language patterns … like using Azerbaijani where they would have originally used a Russian word. And so it's more coming from them, but also an attempt to make themselves more Azerbaijani and less Russified."
Speaking on the general conditions of these Turkic regions, which have only recently begun to reclaim their sovereignty, Marquardt says, "During Soviet times, for any type of socioeconomic or political profession you had to learn the Russian language; and so you had the highest strata of all these societies learning Russian. You had all these people, not just Russians, who came to the country to help direct the country during the Soviet Union and you also had, for example, a lot of Azerbaijanis who would learn Russian and who now still speak Russian much more preferentially to Azeri, because Azeri was simply just unnecessary for them. Obviously, people who speak Russian preferentially to Azeri use more Russian words; they're not as sure as how to use the titular language of the country which they are in."
Given the reality of the Soviet Union being an officially atheist state, Marquardt touched on the way in which repression of religion was also evidenced in active attempts to remove religious vocabulary.
“Saying 'insha'Allah' or something like that -- which is generally something that people will understand in all of those regions -- was for the most part something that was not looked well upon during Soviet times. So you will see in certain sectors of the general population a resurgence of those words and more religious people will use them more often."
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