In the villages and old neighbourhoods of Amasya, the quickest way to identify a person is often to mention the nickname that has attached itself to them over the years; the name on the identity card recedes into the background. In small settlements where dozens of people share the name Ali or Ayşe, this distinction has become an indispensable tool of everyday speech. A nickname based on a trade, an incident or a physical trait sometimes marks an entire family for generations, and grandchildren go on being known by their grandfather's nickname.

The way people address one another in the same region follows a distinctive order of its own. Kinship words such as amca, dayı, hala, teyze, enişte and yenge do more than indicate blood ties and relationship by marriage; they also serve as a measure of respect and closeness. Addressing an older person with a word of kinship or respect rather than by name is part of the region's sense of good manners. Even a neighbour is often called abla, amca or teyze. Taken together, nicknames and forms of address amount to a system of naming that fixes a person's place within the community far more than the name on paper does.

The sources consulted for this article did not turn up a field study that collects nicknames and forms of address specifically for Amasya. What follows therefore draws on two kinds of material: local cultural sources reporting that the tradition is widespread in Amasya's villages, and academic collections made on the Black Sea coast, in Central Anatolia and in eastern Anatolia. Because nicknames and kinship terms work on broadly similar principles in Anatolian villages, these studies also help in understanding practice in Amasya.

What a Nickname Is

Turkish dictionaries define a lakap (nickname) as a name given to a person or a family after the fact, separate from the real name and arising from some characteristic of that person or family. The word is Arabic and its plural is elkâb. The same root survives, with small phonetic differences, in Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur, which shows that the custom is not peculiar to Anatolia but continues across the wide geography where Turkic communities live. In her folklore study of Bartın, Şerife Seher Erol Çalışkan notes that naming and nicknaming have been a naming tradition since Central Asia, and that the earliest examples of nicknames appear in Turkic epics.

The value of a nickname does not always point in the same direction. According to a classification drawn from the relevant entry in the Türk Ansiklopedisi, nicknames are given for three purposes: to praise, to describe and identify, or to belittle. In history the three have run side by side. Yıldırım (Thunderbolt), Fatih (the Conqueror), Yavuz (the Grim), Kanuni (the Lawgiver) and Gazi (the Warrior of the Faith) are nicknames given to rulers and commanders; in village life the same logic operates at a much more everyday level. If a nickname does not offend general morality and the person is known by it in a particular circle, it can in time even replace the name. In legal terms, too, it is not left unprotected: a nickname that amounts to an attack on personality rights benefits from the protection of Article 24 of the Turkish Civil Code.

Nicknaming is also a familiar practice in the Islamic tradition. The Qur'an forbids calling one another by offensive nicknames (Hujurat, 11), while giving a good name is regarded as a sunnah of the Prophet; Abu Turab ("father of dust") for Ali and Abu Hurayra ("father of kittens") are examples cited in this connection. Osman Kibar, who wrote a study of nicknames in Ağaköy in the Biga district of Çanakkale, therefore reminds readers that personality rights must be respected when giving and using a nickname, and that a hurtful nickname counts as a violation of another person's rights in religious terms as well.

How a Nickname Is Born and Takes Hold

According to Çalışkan, anyone who notices a distinctive trait in a person can give them a nickname. At first only the person who coined it uses it; if the community accepts that it suits the person, it spreads gradually and comes to be used by all members of the group. Sometimes it takes such firm hold that the person's real name is no longer used. Kibar likewise says that nicknames are mostly given by others, and that it is exceptional for a person to ask for a particular nickname or to prepare the ground for one. He adds that few people acquire a nickname in childhood, and that by middle age most nicknames have become fixed.

Nicknames can outlive their bearers. Kibar describes how some people live without a nickname and acquire one only after death, and how some nicknames continue through the generations after the person who first carried them. There are even nicknames tied to birth and death: the simplest example is a child whose father has died being called yetim (orphan) and one whose mother has died being called öksüz. The same study treats the case in the Dede Korkut stories, where a boy remains nameless until he shows valour and then receives a name suited to his achievement, as an old counterpart of today's nickname tradition.

The reaction to a nickname varies with its kind. Çalışkan, collecting in Bartın, records that informants hid their own unsuitable nicknames while recounting other people's with a smile, and that they hesitated to give the researcher nicknames they freely used among themselves until they had come to trust her. According to the study's conclusion, belittling nicknames are not said to a person's face, whereas nicknames that praise and raise a person's standing in the community can be said to their face at any age.

A text on local culture written by a village association sums up this working of the nickname in a single observation: a person cannot choose their own nickname, and whatever others see in them becomes their nickname. According to the same text, nicknames are not given at random; each has a reason and, often, a story attached to an incident. Some arise from a mental or physical disability, some from an anomalous act in social life, some from a person's work, habit or an event that befell them. In the author's words, some nicknames fit the person exactly, some are critical, some are comic, and now and then there are hurtful and merciless ones.

Types of Nicknames

The nicknames collected in the central district of Bartın have been classified under thirteen headings according to the reason they were given, and this classification is useful for seeing the general tendency in Anatolian villages. The main groups are as follows: those given for a person's work and occupation, for distinctive physical features, for manner and behaviour, by comparison with animals, tied to an event that was lived through, connected with military service, tied to ethnic origin, a favourite food, the place a person came from or the geography of the place they live, those given after a famous ancestor in the family, and those based on kinship terms. The study's conclusion notes that nicknames given for physical features, behaviour and work are clearly more numerous than the others.

Occupational nicknames are the easiest group to understand. Among those in the collection are Dantel Yeter ("Lace Yeter") for a woman who made and sold lace, Camcı (the glazier) for the owner of a glass shop, Yorgancı Osman for Osman who sewed quilts, and Pastacı (the pastry man) for the person who opened the first pastry shop in the village. According to the finding of Şeref Boyraz as it is reported, occupational names such as hancı (innkeeper), yorgancı (quilt-maker) or nalbant (farrier) do not count as nicknames if the person really practises that trade and the word is placed before the real name in its literal sense; a nickname arises when the word becomes a label that sets the person apart. Physical nicknames feed on details such as height, skin colour, gait and the shape of the face. Among those formed with animal names, a hard-working person is likened to a bee, a hulking one to a bear and a stubborn one to a goat.

Nicknames based on behaviour often live on together with a story. The Bartın collection records names such as Tak Tak for someone who spoke very fast, Müdür (Director) for someone who meddled in every affair in the village, Arşimet (Archimedes) for someone very clever, and Yokcamış for someone who kept saying "yok canım" ("no, really") as he talked. Nicknames tied to events fix a memory that stuck in people's minds; Peri (Fairy) for someone who vanished from sight for three days, and Balık (Fish) for someone who climbed down into the village wells and cleaned them, are of this kind. Although all of these examples come from Bartın, it is reasonable to think that in Amasya's villages the same sources, namely work, appearance, temperament and the incidents that befall people, continue to generate nicknames.

Family Nicknames and Ancestors

The most enduring kind of nickname is the one that becomes the shared name of a family or lineage. In the Bartın collection, "nicknames given after a famous ancestor in the family" form a separate heading and are among the most numerous groups. A family whose great-grandfather was the sailor Ferhat came to be called Ferhat Ağlar; those whose grandfather was a hodja or mullah were called Mollalar, those whose grandfather was a village headman Muhtarlar, and the descendants of an ancestor who went into military service and became a sergeant Çavuşlar. The family of a scale-maker became Kantarcılar, the family of a man who treated animal diseases Paytarlar, and the family that grew a lot of watermelons and sold them to the village Karpuzlar. Even a family's habit of keeping many hens can turn, a generation later, into the name Tavuklar.

Çalışkan regards this practice as an expression of respect for the ancestor and ties it to the strength of kinship bonds in Turkish culture. Another detail that stands out in the collection is that families are sometimes named after the house into which a son-in-law married: the grandchildren of a man who entered a house as a son-in-law begin to be known in the village as Damatlar. The fact that a family in an Amasya village is known by the same nickname for generations is an instance of the same logic. The nickname carries a past name, trade or event of the family within a single word.

The Abundance of Names and the Function of the Nickname

There is a practical reason for the nickname's prevalence. In the concluding section of her Bartın collection Çalışkan writes that in villages children were not given distinctive names as they are today, that people descended from a few lineages, and that men rarely strayed from well-known names such as Ali, Veli, Hasan and Hüseyin, or women from Ayşe, Fatma and Hatice. In such a place the shortest way to tell one Ali from the other Alis, one Ayşe from the other Ayşes, and one lineage from another is the nickname. The observation in the village association's text points the same way: since names and surnames were once less systematic than they are now, identities may have been confused, and nicknames may have been needed to identify people more specifically. Kibar, for his part, links the custom of giving children two names partly to this need, saying that nickname, title, lineage and family name were used together to distinguish people who bore the same name.

In a settlement the number of people without a nickname is very small. Çalışkan reports that, especially in rural areas, those who have reached adolescence without a nickname can be counted on the fingers. A nickname works like a small social cipher; inferences about whether a person is reliable, whether they do their work well, whether they are serious or frivolous fit inside that single word. The village association's text likewise says that almost everyone has a nickname and that these work as a kind of special label.

In village life the nickname also has a side of wit and entertainment. According to the same text, people's gift for caricaturing and describing others shows itself in nicknames, and these make a cultural contribution to the language as products of the community's wit, creativity and intelligence. Among the Trabzon nicknames reported on the basis of newspaper coverage are Kulak Ali (Ear Ali), Telefon Ahmet (Telephone Ahmet), Kambur Ahmet (Hunchback Ahmet) and Bisiklet Yusuf (Bicycle Yusuf), which show that this creativity is not tied to a single region.

1934 and the Turning of Nicknames into Surnames

In the period when surnames were not compulsory, the nickname also did the work of a family name. According to Sabit Dokuyan's study of the Surname Law, before the law mostly nicknames, reputations and the family names a person belonged to were in use; in the Ottoman period "zade" had spread in place of "oğlu" (son of), and a surname or nickname was usually placed before the given name. Saim Sakaoğlu gives an example from his own family: before the law his father's side was known as the Sakavelis and his mother's side as the Nalbants, and since words such as "zade" and "veli" were not to be used in surnames, the Sakaveli nickname was reshaped into Sakaoğlu.

Surname Law No. 2525 was adopted on 21 June 1934 and published in the Official Gazette of 2 July 1934. Under its third article, surnames that carried rank and office, tribal and foreign race and nation names, or that were contrary to general decency, repulsive or ridiculous, could not be used. Law No. 2590, adopted on 26 November of the same year, abolished nicknames and titles such as ağa, hacı, hafız, hoca, molla, efendi, bey, beyefendi, paşa, hanım, hanımefendi and hazretleri. The Minister of the Interior stated that these names were forbidden in official business and before the law, but that in private life people could still address one another as ağa, bey or hoca. This area, left outside official regulation, is the legal background of the tradition of address that lives on today in villages and neighbourhoods.

The village association's text records that some nicknames that predated the Surname Law were given to families as surnames in many places after 1934. After a family's old nickname entered the official records it often went on living in everyday life, and in some families the surname and the nickname have worked side by side. This double layer, a name on the identity card and a name in the neighbourhood, can still be observed in many Anatolian villages today.

Kinship Terms

The system of Turkish kinship terms is a field that linguists and anthropologists have long studied. Serdar Yavuz's article surveying kinship terms in the dialects of Turkey stresses the importance of family and kinship ties in Turkish social life and says that the abundance of kinship terms has made this field open to detailed study. Article 17 of the Civil Code divides blood relationship into two: lineal relationship between persons descending from one another, and collateral relationship between persons descending from a common root. Everyday language goes far beyond this legal classification; it designates the father's side apart from the mother's, the older apart from the younger, and relationship by blood apart from relationship by marriage, each with separate words.

Tuncer Gülensoy's classification divides this variety into five groups: the immediate family (baba, anne, abla, ağabey), the father's side (dede, babaanne, amca, hala and their children), the mother's side (anneanne, dede, teyze, dayı and their children), kinship formed by marriage (yenge, enişte, güvey, dünür, baldız, kayın, elti, görümce, kaynana, kaynata) and the lower generation (oğul, kız, torun). The amca is the father's brother and the hala the father's sister; on the mother's side the equivalents are dayı and teyze. The yenge is the wife of a brother or of an uncle, and the enişte is the husband of a sister or of an aunt. Because Turkish marks each of these relationships with a separate word, a person has already expressed the bond with the one they are speaking to before saying a name.

According to Aygen Erdentuğ's article in Belleten, Turkish blood-kinship terminology falls into the "Sudanese type" pattern, one of the six basic systems in the anthropological literature; it is the system in which descent is traced through the father's line and relationships are named in the most detailed way. Erdentuğ writes that for the sixteen possible blood relationships in one's own generation and that of one's parents there were sixteen separate words, to which were added special terms based on gender for grandparents. The terms differed between town and countryside, in parallel with the Ottoman divide between palace and popular speech. In Anatolia, under the influence of regional dialects, the words for the same relative differ in pronunciation and sometimes are altogether different expressions.

Two figures in the same article show the scale of the variety: fifty-two words for "child" were recorded in different regions, and about a hundred and four for addressing or referring to a man's wife. In the dialect data Yavuz compiled there are forms such as boba, buba, buva and bava for father, bibi for hala, deze or eze for teyze, emmi for amca, bacı for abla and güvey for groom. In the field studies Erdentuğ reports, the same person was addressed with different words in villages of Elazığ and Kayseri in the early 1950s and in villages of Erzurum in the 1970s. In one the mother's sister was called "deyze," in another "hala"; in Erzurum the father's sister was "bibi," the paternal uncle's child "emmi uşağı," and the maternal aunt's children "ezem kızı" and "ezem oğlu." In the old Istanbul speech before 1950, words such as "mahdum" for a son, "kerime" for a daughter, and "amcazade" and "teyzezade" for the children of paternal uncles and maternal aunts were in use.

Studies on the dialects of Amasya show that the region has not been sufficiently collected in this respect. An article on the phonology of the Amasya central dialect notes that Amasya is one of the provinces whose dialect has not been studied and still awaits collection, and bases its work on recordings from five villages in the centre. Yusuf Avcı's 1988 master's thesis deals with the Aydınca dialect of Amasya. Beyond these limited studies, the kinship forms specific to Amasya live largely in oral tradition.

Addressing Non-Relatives with Kinship Terms

Another use of kinship terms in the countryside is to address non-relatives with kinship words. Basing himself on his own observation in a village in Elazığ in 1956, Erdentuğ reports the following pattern: young men call the village elders "emmi" and the younger ones "oğlum"; older women who are not relatives are addressed not by name but as "yenge"; unfamiliar men who come to the village are called "dayı" and women "deyze"; and the wives of friends who are not relatives are called "bacı." The article notes that this manner of address has been used in village settlements for centuries.

In anthropology this practice is known as fictive or imagined kinship. According to Erdentuğ, fictive kinship serves to regulate social relations, widen the network of relationships, and create integration and solidarity within the community. A person who addresses another with a kinship term also has the roles that come with that term accepted by the other, and so good relations are encouraged. The same text records that fictive forms of kinship such as kirvelik (ritual sponsorship), milk-brotherhood, the role of the groom's best man, yengelik and ahret kardeşliği (brotherhood of the afterlife) retain their importance in rural areas. A study of forms of address published in the Çukurova University Journal of Turkology Research also groups Turkish nominal address terms into seven classes: terms of endearment, titles, kinship terms, fictive kinship terms, terms of respect, terms of familiarity and terms of negative sense. The study links the breadth of this address system in Turkish to the tendency of collectivist cultures to distinguish the individual from others by their particular characteristics.

Addressing a neighbour, an elderly acquaintance or a shopkeeper as amca, abla or teyze in Amasya is today's trace of this tradition. Records of local customs likewise show the words relative, neighbour and friend placed side by side at moments when the community comes together. When the bride is fetched, a convoy is put together from the vehicles of relatives, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. Before a young man goes off to military service, relatives, neighbours and friends take turns inviting him to meals and give him gifts such as pocket money and clothing; on the day he leaves he is sent off by all his close ones with drum and zurna, with halay dances and with prayers. The closeness in the language of address runs on the same ground as this practical solidarity.

Today

Researchers are cautious about the future of kinship terms. Yavuz says that as society industrialises and individualises, kinship ties and terms weaken, that some words lose their capacity to express detail and take on an increasingly general meaning, and that others fall out of use altogether. Erdentuğ, for his part, notes that most of the old words still live in the countryside, but that with the growth of education, transport and mass communication villagers also know the kinship words peculiar to towns and use them when needed. In the studies he cites, villagers distinguish between "village language" and "city language," and men in particular take care to use the forms used in towns when speaking with a researcher.

Kinship terms have also travelled to the cities. Erdentuğ writes that, as a result of the internal migration under way since the 1950s and the ruralisation of cities, addressing a neighbour, a shopkeeper or a stranger as "abla," "amca" or "teyze" has become a lasting pattern of address in cities too. In anthropology this use is known as the "manipulation" of kinship terms: a person creates a temporary kinship in order to enter an acceptable role relationship with the one they are speaking to, and the word chosen is determined by the degree of closeness or respect it evokes. Part of the address heard every day in Amasya also circulates between village and town through these migrations.

The nickname, for its part, has put on a new guise in the electronic world. The village association's text says that the nickname has today been replaced by the "nick," the "nickname" and the "username," but that the nicknames others give people will go on being used in everyday life. Behind the continuation of the tradition in Amasya's villages, as in other Anatolian regions, lies the fact that people know one another through the life they share rather than through the name on an identity document. It is also recounted that the Amasya region has been home to different communities since the early stages of Anatolia's Turkification and Islamisation; this diversity has gone on working side by side with a shared language of neighbourliness and kinship.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Çalışkan, Şerife Seher Erol. "Türk Folklorunda Lâkap Verme Geleneği: Bartın Örneği." Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 14/3 (September 2016).
  • Erdentuğ, Aygen. "Günümüz Türkiyesi'nde Akrabalık Terimlerinin Kullanımı." Belleten 56/216 (August 1992). belleten.gov.tr
  • Yavuz, Serdar. "Türkiye Türkçesi Ağızlarında Akrabalık Adları." Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 23/2 (2013), pp. 71-91.
  • Dokuyan, Sabit. "Soyadı Kanunu ve Kanunun Uygulanma Süreci." Tarih İncelemeleri Dergisi XXXI/1 (2016), pp. 129-166.
  • "Türkçede Hitap İfadeleri: Anlam ve Sözcük Türü Temelinde Bir Ulamlama." Çukurova Üniversitesi Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi.
  • "Amasya Merkez Ağzı'nın Ses Bilgisi Özellikleri." Diyalektolog - Ağız Araştırmaları Dergisi.

Official sources

Books

  • Kibar, Osman. Ağaköy Lakapları: Köy Lakapları Üzerine Bir Tasnif Denemesi. Biga: YarımElma Yayınevi, 2017.

Other sources

Online sources