Ban on languages other than Turkish

The Ban on languages other than Turkish is recalled through Rabo Karabekian’s father, who tells his son that the Turks once punished people for speaking any language but Turkish by tearing out their tongues. In the family’s Armenian conversations, the remembered penalty makes language more than a means of communication: it is a practice shadowed by violence, yet still carried forward between father and son.

The Recalled Penalty

The father states the threat in deliberately stark terms: “Tear out my tongue if you catch me speaking Armenian,” he might say. He explains that this was the penalty imposed by the Turks in the seventeenth century for speaking any language other than Turkish. The father’s phrasing turns a historical punishment into a first-person formula, as though the threatened body remains present in the act of speaking.

The recollection identifies the rule as coercion directed at language itself. Its violence is not abstract: the tongue, the organ of speech, is the target. The father’s account therefore joins political domination to the bodily capacity through which a language is spoken and passed on.

Armenian Between Father and Son

The father speaks Armenian while working as a cobbler in San Ignacio, and Rabo explains that only his mother and he can understand his Armenian self-pity; there are no other Armenians within a hundred miles. The language is consequently both a family bond and a marker of their isolation. The Turkish prohibition belongs to the past, but its memory accompanies Armenian speech in the present of the recollection.

The father also uses Armenian to quote Shakespeare, whom he knows thoroughly in that language. For example, he gives “To be or not to be” as “Linel kam chlinel.” The juxtaposition shows Armenian serving not only as the language of private complaint but also as a vehicle for literary knowledge. The remembered threat of punishment and the father’s continued use of Armenian sit side by side: a language subjected to prohibition remains capable of carrying poetry and learning.

Cultural Memory and Survival

The rule’s significance lies in the contrast between its intended silencing and the speech that survives in the family. The father recalls a penalty severe enough to make the tongue itself an emblem of vulnerability, yet he continues to speak Armenian to Rabo and to make Shakespeare audible through it. The remembered prohibition thus frames cultural inheritance as something carried in ordinary acts of speech, even when the speakers are far from other Armenians.

The passage does not describe the law’s enforcement in San Ignacio or claim that the family faces the same punishment there. Instead, it presents the father’s statement as historical memory, spoken in a household where Armenian remains intelligible to mother and son. That distinction preserves the rule’s force without confusing the remembered Turkish penalty with the family’s circumstances in California.