Business naming practices in Turkey: the foreign effect

Abstract

This paper investigates the ongoing influence of foreign lexical elements and Englishization on business naming practices in Turkey. It is argued that the impact offoreignization and the English language on Turkish business naming continues to increase and manifests itself in various creative ways. The effect of foreignization and English on the Turkish business context, especially shop-naming, was widely discussed in previous work. The consensus seems to be that non-Turkish elements used in shop-naming could be classified into three major categories: (i) foreign signs which could either be English or non-English, (ii) hybrid signs that include a combination of elements from Turkish and a foreign language and (ii¡) Englishized Turkish signs which are artificially created signs that use English orthography. I show in this paper that in addition to the existing practices employed, there is a recent novel business naming practice in the country. This new strategy, which I call consonant doubling in this work, copies the consonant in the middle of the word and is sometimes accompanied by an English functional element. Interestingly, this new strategy has some important linguistic consequences since it changes both the syllable structure and the pronunciation of the word it applies to. Further research will reveal whether the process will have certain long-term effects on the language.