A few weekends ago, I went to the flea market in Bomonti, a neighbourhood on the European side of Istanbul. I go there regularly, and over the years I’ve accumulated a small collection of things: embroidered napkins, records, old issues of House & Garden, earrings, candle holders. It is usually on the days when you are not looking for anything in particular that you find the most interesting things – or, as the Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali once wrote, “some things we never know we need until we find them”.

That particular Sunday, strolling through the stalls, I came across a book from 1965 titled Türkler için Almanca – Deutsch für Türken (German for Turks). It was among the first language textbooks of its kind, widely distributed to the so-called Gastarbeiter – “guest workers” – who came to West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. The economic boom of the 1950s had created an acute labour shortage, prompting the recruitment of workers from abroad. A bilateral agreement with Turkey, signed in 1961, facilitated the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Turkish men and women to come and work in German factories. Officially, their stay was meant to be temporary. Workers came alone; families stayed behind. A copy of the language book I found 60 years later at a flea market in Istanbul would have been in the suitcases of many of these workers.

Learning a new language as an adult is hard. I am struggling, as a German speaker, to learn Turkish myself. There are few similarities between the two languages. Turkish suffixes, for example, add meaning to the ends of words. Where German – like English – needs four words to say “I am at home”, Turkish needs just one: evdeyim. There is no grammatical gender in Turkish. In German, everything has one. Even sentence structure is reversed. In German, we say: “Iris drinks coffee.” In Turkish: “Iris coffee drinks.”

I own a Turkish grammar book that explains these differences from a German linguistic perspective. The authors of Türkler için Almanca promised in their foreword that........

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