The Turkish Speakers in London

Upon my return home one afternoon I decided to grab a quick sandwich at the newly opened Subway on Green Lanes in Haringey. I noticed a recently added sign on the window that read ‘Halal’.  This observation seemed to me to stand for not only religious consideration but cultural and ethnic integration in Today’s Multicultural London.  It proved to stand for the Hybrid culture that has evolved in Haringey and other parts of London and the United Kingdom.

                Hybridity had become a very commonly used word and metaphor in Cultural Studies.  Hybridization is defined as “the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices” . Cultural Hybridity is a mixture between different cultures that are still apparent in themselves in the sense that the separate cultural forms intermingle and intercept to make new cultural forms. The contemporary cultural formation that will be examined in this essay is that of the Turkish Speaking Population in the London Borough of Haringey.

                When considering the Turkish ‘speaking’ population, there are three groups being looked at: the Turkish-Cypriots, The Turks from mainland Turkey and the Kurdish population from mainland Turkey. Reasoning for immigration to the United Kingdom is different for each of these groups as well as the timing that migration took place. The first to arrive to England were the Turkish-Cypriots in the 1950s and 1960s, they are also, in many ways, better established than more recent Turkish speaking arrivals. Cyprus was a British Colony until 1960 and many Turkish-Cypriots came to England to escape ethnic tensions between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, which culminated in the Turkish invasion of the north of the island in 1974, while others came as economic migrants. The Turks came for various political and economic reasons, one being the Military coup on the Turkish Mainland by General Kenan Evren in 1980. The Kurdish population in Turkey are generally the most recent arrivals who have fled oppression and discrimination in Turkey. Most of them arrived in England as refugees. There has been much conflict amongst the Turkish and Kurdish population in Turkey, whereas restraint of the Kurdish language and culture by the Turkish State has resulted in most Turkish Kurds speaking Turkish. There will naturally be different identities amongst these separate but linked groups of people.