Linguistic purism in Turkish / AKA don't worry, Turkish is in no danger of being taken over by foreign vocabulary

Turkish vocabulary. That big blue part of the pie chart is native Turkish vocabulary, the other colours are words from other languages. Along with the completely different grammar and sentence structure from these languages (mostly Arabic, French, Persian and English, none of which are related to Turkish) Turkish is in no danger of being taken over by foreign vocabulary.

Along with most languages there's a certain element of linguistic purism in Turkish, where foreign loanwords are often looked down upon when there's a perfectly acceptable Turkish term available, and a fear that the language is acquiring too many English terms and that it'll one day become a kind of half English mishmash. This is in my opinion generally unfounded, because a language like Turkish just isn't made to be taken over in that way, just like how Persian has stayed Indo-European despite all the Arabic influence. There's a blog post here about certain words that the author believes shouldn't be used in Turkish:


* Mail DEĞİL İleti
* Fonksiyon DEĞİL İşlev
* Avantaj DEĞİL Üstünlük
* Antipatik DEĞİL Sevimsiz
* Dizayn DEĞİL Tasarım
* Analiz DEĞİL Çözümleme
* Bye Bye DEĞİL Hoşçakal

Değil means not, so "NOT mail, ileti", etc.

Most I agree with, but not all.

1) Mail - this one is good, because "mail" sounds like "mile", and to make it sound like English mail you would have to write "meyl" which now doesn't even look like the original word, so ileti is much better.
2) Fonksiyon - okay. Either one seems okay to me though.
3) Avantaj - this one actually comes from French, not English (note the pronunciation). The word üstünlük (lit. superiorness) is easier to understand for those that don't already know the English or French word.
4) Dizayn - I agree, tasarım looks much better. Dizayin just looks a bit awkward.
5) Analiz - another word from French. Analiz looks fine to me.
6) Bye bye - hoşça kal is definitely better, but greetings are very liable to drift between languages anyway, so there's no stopping this. Even Chinese often uses this (886, 拜拜啰 <-- means bye-bye).


On the whole, Turkish works better without foreign vocabulary due to vowel harmony and derivation. The word analiz above has the Turkish equivalent çözümleme, which comes from çözümlemek (to analyze), and from that you can derive a ton of other words like çözümlenmez (unable to be analyzed) and çözümsel (analytical). You can do this to a certain extent with something like analiz and the verb yapmak, but it's not quite as open-ended, and often requires using foreign derivation like just using analitik for analytical.