Analysis of Turkish Native Speakers’ Perception of Loan Words Borrowed from Western Languages

There has been an influx of loan words into Turkish from Western European languages, especially from English for almost two centuries. Great increase in the number of loan words brings up worries about gradual change of phonological features and rules dominating the language. In this paper we consider how native speakers approach the loan words being used in Turkish and whether degrees of “acceptance” of and “alienation” from loan words show certain tendencies or not and finally what relationships there are between these tendencies and native speaker characteristics such as gender, job and educational level. It is normally expected that native speaker intuition for loan words may vary according to their personal characteristics. By analyzing the tendencies of native speakers in perceiving loan words and by finding out the relationship between tendencies and characteristics we may come up with suggestions about attitudes to be assumed and measures to be taken against the use of loan words in Turkish.