turkic-languages

"The leading tendency of national-linguistic development has become bilingualism: the mastery in equal degree of the native and the Russian languages, and this has been by far an unfinished process, which requires constant attention [...] The interest towards the Bashkir language from other ethnicities has kept growing, the functions of the Bashkir language expanding [...] - Preface, Bashkir-Russian Dictionary: 32000 words. Moscow, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996. Page v."

"The most beautiful Turkish is the Turkish of the 1920s, sir, there is no need to delve deeper... Its simplest form is the Turkish of Ömer Seyfettin's stories. Novelist Hüseyin Rahmi's Turkish, Yakup Kadri's Turkish, Yahya Kemal's Turkish…. Turkish was corrupted in the 1930s, the state tried to reform Turkish by force of bayonets, and this eventually became the title of the book of the Englishman I mentioned earlier: He calls the language revolution "a catastrophic success." Those who translated it into Turkish also translated it as "tragic success". — Mehmed Şevket Eygı. A Portrait of a Muslim Gentleman from Istanbul."