THE REFLECTION OF THE DICHOTOMY OF CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY ON LANGUAGE IN TURKEY: AN ANALYSIS OF IDEOLOGICAL PRODUCTION IN NEWSPAPERS’ CROSSWORDS

Turkey is a polarized society consisting of modern people and conservatives. Cultural differences in this polarized society are actually a consequence of a long historical process. The dichotomy of culture and ideology in Turkish society has two significant breaking points. The first is the transition process of Turkish society to Islam between the 8th century and the 14th century whereas the second is related to the concept of Westernization, the influences of which are still observable although it started in the 17th century. These two occasions not only changed the lifestyle of Turkish society but also influenced the use of Turkish language. In terms of word capacity, Turkish language therefore contains both Oriental/Islamic ideology and Western/Modern ideology within itself, and this impact is considerably recognizable from spoken language to written language and from scientific language to media language. Media entertainment contents also reveal this interaction. The objective of this study is to analyze the cultural and ideological polarization in Turkey through investigating the contents of crosswords in five daily newspapers which are, respectively, Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Yeni Akit and Zaman. Media usually has an ideological content; however the fact that ideological and cultural polarization can also be explored at linguistic levels through crosswords has not been studied before. In this respect, firstly clarifying the concept of ideology in order to theoretically reveal how ideology is reinforced through language, this study basically focuses on the historical process of the cultural and ideological polarization and its reflections on Turkish language. The study, linguistically analyzing the crosswords, has also discussed the relationship among entertainment, ideology and media. Data in the study was collected through content analysis method and was interpreted by means of critical discourse theory. In this respect, this study has actually multi-methodological method. Ten crosswords from each newspaper have etymologically been analyzed, and it has been found out that there are similarities between the words in the crosswords and the publication policies of the newspapers.