Business naming practices in Turkey: the foreign effect

Abstract

This paper investigates the ongoing influence of foreign lexical elements and Englishization on the practice of naming businesses in Turkey. It is argued that the impact of foreignization and the English language on this business naming continues to increase and is manifested in various creative ways. The effect of foreignization and English on the Turkish business context, especially in shop-naming, has been widely discussed in previous researches. The consensus was that non-Turkish elements used in shop-naming could be classified into three major categories namely, foreign signs, hybrid signs and Englishized Turkish signs. In this paper, I demonstrate that in addition to the existing practices, there is a recent novel business naming practice in the country. This new strategy, which I call "consonant duplication" in this work, copies the consonant in the middle of the word and is sometimes accompanied by an English functional element. Interestingly, this has some important linguistic consequences because it changes both the syllable structure and the pronunciation of the word it applies to. Further research will reveal whether the practice will have certain long-term effects on the language.