[en] In examining the 1984-1989 forced assimilation campaign against the Turks in Bulgaria, this article seeks to achieve two purposes. First, it aims to reconstitute the process through which minority language and names came to be constructed as political and security issues in socialist Bulgaria. Second, this paper endeavors to explore the daily experiences and the changing meanings invested by Bulgaria's Turks in both their mother tongue and the official language, as they faced increasingly repressive state policies. Drawing primarily on archival material, the author argues that the so-called 'Revival process' is rooted in the complex interweaving between a unitary vision of the nation-state that dates back to the 19th Century and a communist modernization-homogenization project, which relied on (promethean) social engineering. The extension of nationalizing policies to minority languages also needs to be set against a historical background where language and ethnicity, in addition to religion, a decisive criterion of belonging in the Ottoman Empire acquired new significance in the course of Bulgaria's nation-building process, thus becoming loci of nationalizing practices. Although the assimilation process led many a Turk to turn the use of Turkish into an act of resistance, one cannot assume that daily language practices are necessarily fraught with political significance and constitute mere responses to state policies. In order to make that point, the paper engages with the historical ways in which social and linguistic hierarchies have developed in Bulgaria before and during socialism. It also shows how and why contention over language has decreased since 1989. The Bulgarian case study thus provides a welcome reminder that political, economic and identity stakes are not bound to be framed in linguistic terms and to become sites of interethnic friction.

[fr] En prenant pour objet la bulgarisation forcée de l'onomastique et la censure de la langue turque entre 1984 et 1989, l'objectif de cet article est d'interroger les logiques sociales de la construction de la langue en enjeu politique et sécuritaire en Bulgarie communiste. Il est ensuite de reconstituer la trajectoire non linéaire au terme de laquelle l'usage du turc a été investi de significations politiques. Cette démarche nous amènera à éclairer un processus d'assimilation violente né du croisement entre une vision unitaire de l'État-nation datant du xixe siècle et un projet communiste de modernisation-homogénéisation opéré à travers une ingénierie sociale prométhéenne. L'extension à l'univers linguistique des politiques de nationalisation a également été rendue possible par le lent déplacement des logiques organisatrices des identifications depuis un découpage confessionnel hérité de l'Empire ottoman vers un principe stato-national ayant fait de l'ethnicité et de la langue, en sus de la confession, des marqueurs identitaires privilégiés. Loin de constituer les simples reflets de ces politiques, les politisations minoritaires de la langue - inscrites dans une histoire ayant diversement tissé hiérarchies sociales et linguistiques - ont perdu en intensité depuis 1989, rappelant qu'il n'existe pas d'automaticité à la construction linguistique des enjeux politiques, économiques ou identitaires.