ISTANBUL, Turkey -- As foreign languages infiltrate Turkey's schools and culture, Turkish is starting to sound like Turkey talk.

Just as Americans will toss an occasional "je ne sais quoi" into conversation, Turkish intellectuals pepper their speech with foreign words and phrases.

But not always for show. After so much reading and research in foreign languages, the elite are forgetting their native tongue.

Sometimes the use of English is snobbish, admits Gursel Ugurlu, head of the English department at Sultan Fatih private high school in Istanbul. "But some do it unconsciously, because when they're speaking they can't remember the Turkish word."

It's not just intellectuals. Pop musicians try to sing lyrics in English whether they speak the language or not. Imported Western TV shows and movies are dubbed or subtitled in Turkish -- with grammatical mistakes and foreign phrases rendered too literally. Young Turks now speak of "taking a shower" or "catching a cab," even though the verbs don't make sense in Turkish.

Murat Bicak, a young script writer, says he cringes when he hears fellow countrymen speaking their own language with a foreign accent for snob appeal. He imitates their pronouncing "hello" with an American heartland accent -- "meraba," rather than the proper, more Middle Eastern-sounding "merhaba."

"People feel more valuable if they speak bad, broken English than correct Turkish," says Yurdanur Salman, a linguist. "It has to do with the great blind admiration for anything Western."

Young people want to connect with Western culture, to study and work abroad, and to land lucrative jobs at home. In response, the best high schools and universities teach in foreign languages, and even academics are losing their grasp of their language's finer points. Some experts worry that students who live with one language but study in another never learn either well enough to express themselves fully.

"In Turkey, if you want a good job, you have to learn a foreign language," says Ugurlu. But, he cautions, "if students start to learn in the foreign language from an early age, then they can't learn their native language. It's difficult to have it both ways."

The government recently passed a law requiring all but a handful of universities that teach in foreign languages to offer equivalent programs taught in Turkish. But the law is widely ignored, and new English-only schools continue to open and attract the most students.

And now, those who have been educated in foreign languages are beginning to teach the next generation. Sometimes their Turkish has all but vanished. Selim Eyuboglu teaches film theory in a Turkish university, but lectures in English. "I don't feel completely comfortable in Turkish," he explains.

He prefers that students submit papers in English. "I wouldn't know how to write properly in Turkish so I wouldn't want to judge it," the professor says.

Some students want to write papers in English to help them get into British or American graduate schools. Without a solid base in a foreign language, the chances of studying abroad and impressing top employers are slim.

Students' concern over the future starts at age 14, when they take a national exam for entrance into selective secondary schools. The best schools -- run by foreign governments or privately -- teach in English, German or French. Upon entering, students spend a year immersed in language study. After that, all texts and classes are in the foreign language and students do not develop academic skills in Turkish.

Some argue that a crash course is not sufficient for students to dive into advanced texts and to discuss complex topics such as philosophy. "It's kind of weird," says Cem Alptekin, dean of the education school at Bogazici University, the premier English-language college. "You have your basic Turkish, then are exposed to formal English."

But the English goes only so far. Because most are not native speakers, even the professors' English is not perfect.

"One of our teachers used to pronounce foreign, 'foRAIN,' " says Meric Soylu, a young graduate of Bogazici. "Then you get to the States and people there are like, 'What does foRAIN mean?' "

Students who can speak textbook English are still challenged. "When it comes to slang they have a handicap," Alptekin says. "If I ask, 'Does that ring a bell?' they'll say, 'What bell? Where is it?' "

The Bogazici campus is a curious hybrid. Students wait at a bus stop marked "Shuttle Bus Duragi," and a map announces "You are Here" in English, then proceeds to label all the buildings in Turkish only. The university's phone system is not bilingual, but goes back and forth between English and Turkish without warning.

Graduates of these elite schools end up speaking what education experts are calling "Tarzanish," a mixed-up version of two languages that allows full expression in neither.

"After all this, you find out you're not so great in English and not so great in Turkish," says Elif Gulen, a graduate student at Bilgi University. Sometimes he will start a sentence in Turkish and finish it in English without realizing the switch.

To smooth over their English, many university graduates study with private tutors. Salman, the linguist whom many go to for help, says they discover not how bad their English is but that they can't speak Turkish. "I see them speaking Turkish but thinking in English."

Learning foreign languages is important, she says, but not as a replacement for Turkish. "The clearest channel to learning is one's native language," she says. "I ask my students, 'Is there a language called Turkish? OK, then let's use it.' "

For Bicak, who was educated in German, learning to speak eloquent Turkish meant continuing to read Turkish on his own during school and referring to the dictionary for Turkish words he already knew in German.

"Some people automatically think, 'If it's English, it's better,' " he says. "But this is a sick mentality. This is my language and it's important to me to be able to communicate in it properly."

As less is written in Turkish, however, proper terminology becomes harder to find. Turkish dictionaries used to be continually updated by the Turkish Language Association. But that institution was closed after the 1980 military coup, and the language is now left without a guardian.

Even if one wants to concentrate on Turkish, it is not practical since in many fields the most resources are in English. "It's hard to read in one language then write in another," says Gulen. "The books are in English, so if you want to write in Turkish you end up struggling more with translation than composition."

Although Eyuboglu has already converted to English, he doesn't necessarily recommend that for Gulen's generation. He says, "There should be some people who suffer through working in Turkish so there is a body of work in Turkish for the next generation."

Pub Date: 3/29/99