ÇKP İktidarı Sonrası Doğu Türkistan da Uygulanan Dil Politikaları

The eastern part of Greater Turkestan was officially incorporated into the People's Republic of China in 1949. In 1955, it was transformed into an autonomous region at the provincial level, fully subordinate to China, and was named the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (ibid.). The administration of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) subsequently began to govern the various nationalities within its borders through a Chinese-style socialist ideology. Since 1955, the dominant group in China, the Han Chinese, has systematically, deliberately and persistently implemented uncompromising language, culture and education policies with the aim of governing the Muslim Turkic/Uyghur society. This society differs fundamentally from Han society in all its social structures and institutions, and the aforementioned policies aim to bring it closer to Han Chinese society, integrating it and ultimately assimilating it.

The unilateral and rigid policies in question were decided upon and subsequently enforced without consultation with local intellectuals or language users who would have been capable of representing the interests of the target community. While such practices initially provoked resistance among members of the target society, the severity of the sanctions imposed eventually led to a process of passive acceptance. In the course of this process, regional languages were reduced to local languages, local languages to family languages, and some family languages have been almost entirely replaced by Chinese, facing extinction. Even Uyghur, a dialect of Eastern Turkic with a long-established written language tradition, has increasingly become little more than a "translation of Chinese", whether in its written form or in media and spoken usage. In certain Uyghur regions, it has even been identified as being at risk of obsolescence.