Lebanon

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Turkish language in Lebanon

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Sun, 2022-03-13 08:37
Regarding: 
Language Counts
Country: 
Lebanon

According to various sources, many Armenians in Lebanon speak Turkish:

  • "Armenians born, raised in Lebanon still have command of Turkish language"www.aa.com.tr. Retrieved 2022-03-13He said that nearly 70% of Armenians in Lebanon can speak Turkish, adding that the new generation also learned Turkish thanks to Turkish soap operas.
  • جدلية, Jadaliyya-. "The Legacy of Turkish in the Armenian Diaspora"Jadaliyya - جدلية. Retrieved 2022-03-13Turkish was certainly at its strongest among Armenians in the early years of the diaspora, but by no means have the second, third, or fourth generations completely lost touch with the language. Turkish is firmly implanted in the colloquial Western Armenian spoken among descendants of Ottoman Armenians from both Turkish- and Armenian-speaking families. Mixing in Turkish is still so commonplace in conversation that it is a great compliment to be known to speak makour [clean] Armenian.
  • "Armenians, Kurds in Lebanon hold on to their languages | Samar Kadi". AW. Retrieved 2022-03-13. When Armenians first arrived in Lebanon [fleeing genocide in Turkey], they spoke their native language in addition to the Turkish language. Eventually the third gen­eration lost the Turkish, replacing it with Arabic
  • "PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE USE AMONG ARMENIANS IN BEIRUT". studylib.net. Retrieved 2022-03-13.
The figure from Anadolu Agence (70%) is probably exaggerated. The last source mentions that people above 55yo speak Turkish. So that's maybe between 1/3 and half of the 336,000 Armenians in Lebanon?
  • And then there are Turkmen (including Syrian Turkmen refugees from Syria), many of them speaking standard Turkish ("We observed that the education levels in the villages are directly proportional with Turkmen identity and the protection of Turkish language. We saw that Turkmens, who were friends with Arab children and got training in Arab language, forgot Turkish. In Aydamun, which has the highest education level among all the villages, Turkish was forgotten. Yet in Baalbeck, where the education level is low, Turkish was better preserved."): https://orsam.org.tr//d_hbanaliz/Analiz_11_eng.pdf
  • This report also mentions Armenians btw: "We found that the Armenian citizens we interviewed in Beirut speak Turkish very well. When we asked why, they said that they speak Turkish at home and watch Turkish TV shows."
Editorial Action

We will update the L1 speaker population and add an L2 speaker population for Turkish [tur] in Lebanon, to be included in the next edition of the Ethnologue.