If you turn on a Turkish television today and turn to channel 6, you'll encounter something that would have been unimaginable even a couple years ago: the letters W, Q and X, emerging from the mouths of soap-opera actors on a legal, public national channel.
Those letters, absent from the Turkish alphabet but part of the minority Kurdish language, are still officially illegal to utter or print in Turkey, despite the fact a sixth of the population, or 12 million people, are Kurds. The Turks, according to the constitution that founded their country, are one people, one ethnic group, with one language, regardless of the facts.
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