JINHA

NEWS CENTER – The Turkish Language Society, the official regulatory body of the Turkish language, has been drawing heavy fire on social media and in protests across Turkey for defining the word "available" as "ready to flirt; easy to flirt with (woman)."The Turkish Parliament discussed the definition yesterday in their General Session.

After the first definition of "available" as "convenient, fit," the secondary definition appears in the Society's official online dictionary. The state institution, charged with regulating the Turkish language, has drawn heavy fire across social media for formalizing sexism and rape culture in the official dictionary of the Turkish language. The Istanbul Feminist Collective wrote: "Why is 'woman' in parentheses in this definition? Can't a man be 'available?' We demand that this sexist expression be immediately removed."

"When we look for the hegemonic mindset, we find it in the Turkish Language Society," said Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Istanbul MP LeventTüzel. "This is a discourse that sees women as servile, that debases them, that emphasizes inequality, that is open to sexist exploitation."

HDP Diyarbakır MP NurselAydoğan requested that the Parliament's Research Committee open an investigation into sexist discourse in the official online dictionary of the Turkish Language Society.

Meanwhile, the group chairs of both the AKP and CHP denounced the definition, although the CHP blamed it on the penetration of the ruling party's mindset into state institutions.

Protestors have also found that the Society's online dictionary used the word "whore" to define the phrase "bad woman." At the same time, the word "bad man" is defined as a villain in a film.

(fk/mg/cm)