My Grandmother's Turkish

My nana never studied Turkish. She would have laughed at the idea. But when she wanted me to hurry, she said hajde. When she was worried, she had dert. When something was beautiful, it was šeftelija, like a ripe peach. When she served coffee, she brought it on a tepsija with a fildžan for each guest and a glass of water nobody was allowed to forget.

I grew up in Edinburgh and spoke to her in a careful, school-learned Bosnian. It was only when I began studying Turkish at university, in a cold seminar room with a radiator that clanked like a tram, that I realised how much of it I already knew.

Finding her in the dictionary

The first lesson was about the home. Kapı, door. Pencere, window. Bahçe, garden. Avlu, courtyard. I wrote each one down and next to it, without thinking, the word my nana used: kapija, pendžer, bašča, avlija. My teacher, a patient woman from Konya, leaned over my notebook and smiled. “Ah,” she said. “You have a Bosnian grandmother.”

It became a game. Every new Turkish word I learned, I checked against her vocabulary. Sometimes there was a match, sometimes a near miss, sometimes a beautiful mistranslation: merak, which in Turkish is curiosity or worry, in her mouth meant delight, a passion for something.

The language between

Linguists call these words turcizmi. To me they are something warmer: a third language, made of the overlap between two. It is not quite Turkish and not quite Bosnian. It is the language of a woman who never left the Balkans, spoken by a granddaughter who was never really from there, recognised in a classroom in Scotland by a teacher from central Anatolia.

My nana died the spring I passed my Turkish exam. At the funeral, an old man from her village said to me, Allah rahmet eylesin. I answered him in Turkish. He looked at me, startled, and then nodded, as if I had finally said something in her voice.