The banal and the subversive

Abstract

The production of national languages involves the uneven contribution of competing groups who have unequal access to the means of its production. The very notion of a fixed, ‘given’ national language, is a sign of success for a whole array of institutional practices which naturalize the power relations implied in it. This article discusses how the banalities of commercial broadcasting have challenged the taken-for-granted canons of Turkish as a national language, and destabilized, in different ways, the processes of inclusion and exclusion which underpin distinctions between new/old, high/low Turkish. It focuses on two illustrative cases – popular comedy films and advertisements on Muslim channels – to develop and elaborate this point.