This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into Modern Turkish, the most thorough-going piece of linguistic engineering in history. In 1928 the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. Two years later Ataturk declared that the Turkish nation must liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages, and instituted a government-sponsored campaign to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin. When popular speech or ancient texts failed to provide the needed words, the reformers invented them.