A Strong Business Language Market Barrier Case: Turkish in Turkey

For a better understanding of Turkey’s growing dynamics for foreigners I would like to propose two hypotheses to discuss and one recommendation:

(1) Turkish is the main and only business language in Turkey, and this situation creates a market barrier for foreigners.

(2) The native professionals in Turkey don’t want to “waste time” to learn a foreign language because of the market size, and the protecting market barrier.

Here are some probative statistics:

• The legal foreigners in population were 42.7% for GCC countries, 6.5 % for EU (4.0% with citizens of non-EU countries), and only %0.2 for Turkey in 2010. (Sources: National Offices of Statistics (Fargues, 2011), Population and Social Conditions (eurosat) and Turkish National Police statistics).

• Only 5% of Turkish citizens could speak a language well enough in order to be able to have a conversation excluding his / her mother language.(Source: “Europeans and their Languages”, European Commission, 2006, p.10. Unfortunately the survey didn’t include Turkey in 2012.) 2006.

By accepting the first statistic as a proof of fewness of foreigners working in Turkey and the second one for the reluctance to learn a foreign language (or else we should say the Turkish people cannot learn foreign languages because of mental and / or methodology problems  ) can we say the hypotheses are more or less supported? If yes the recommendation is to learn Turkish if you want to make business with these persistent people who seems don’t want to learn any foreign language.

By the way an additional question may be helpful to understand the difference between Europeans’ and Turkish people’s foreign language speaking skills. Are English and German and French really different languages?