Turkish Language and Literature

There is a close relationship between language and society. To understand the culture of a society, to access the judgments, thoughts, and believes of a given community one should refer to its language, especially to its vocabulary. The words consisting of the vocabulary do not exist as independent items in the human mind. They are rather mutually linked by means of connotations, metaphoric connections, and associations. The present study aims to understand the social and cultural profile of European Turks in the context of Belgium by the help of these kinds of word relations. In this study only word associations will be referred. The study was conducted both in Belgium and Turkey. Participants were 20 male and 20 female between the age of 25-40, that is from the second generation, in Belgium. They all had a higher school certificate. This can be called as experimental group. The control group from Turkey also consisted of 20 male and 20 female at the same age scale, and from the same educational background. For the association test 30 target words which were assumed to have rich associations for cultural and social analysis were listed. Both groups were asked to write three associations for the listed target words, and they are informed that writing the third association was optional. At the end of the study approximately 3000 words are collected from each group. The following conclusions have been derived by the preliminary evaluations of this corpus: Firstly, the target words have largely similar associations in both groups. This may be due to close connections with Turkey, both officially and emotionally. So it is not surprising that the associations of the word "to go" are "Turkey, to my homeland, leaving here etc.", and the associations of the word "the state" are "Turkey, love for flag, my homeland, and even the present prime minister of Turkey etc." Secondly, the associations of experimental group have a strong emphasis on education. The words "the child, to think, to go, the future" produce rich associations about education, but there is no such an explicit point in control group. Thirdly, there are some differences about the perceptions of "the home/the house". The Belgian Turks perceive "the home/the house" as a property rather than seeing it as a place where the household is done or a distinct kind of life style can be observed. So the words "to take/to buy, to do/to make" produce a great number of associations around the concepts of buying a house or building a house. Finally, friendship and neighborhood perception of groups has different characteristics. While the word "the neighbor" lead to strong associations about charity or helping each other in control group, it is relatively weak in experimental group. This should not be explained by the attrition of some values in Turkish community in Belgium. Because from personal observations and interviews with some Belgian Turks we can say that these people help their family members, friends and acquaintances in Turkey both in cash and in kind. The underlying reasons could be related to the powerful welfare system in Belgium. For the sake of brevity, we have only mentioned the very apparent points of the associations. A detailed analysis of the corpus will shed a light on the kinship relations, communication needs, gender perceptions, integration problems of second generation European Turks.