Titles and nicknames

If titles were abolished in 1934, why do surnames such as Ağaoğlu, Çelebi and Tekin still turn up in the Turkish population register? There is no one-line answer. Looking at the words themselves helps. The surnames in this group come either from the name of an office or rank, or from a nickname that once set one person apart from the neighbours.

What the law said

Article 3 of the Surname Law (Law No. 2525) banned names of military ranks and civil offices as surnames. Article 9 of the Surname Regulation (Soyadı Nizamnamesi) repeated the ban for ranks and offices “of the old or new state cadres”. Then Law No. 2590, passed on 26 November 1934, abolished titles and honorifics such as ağa, hacı, hafız, hoca, molla, efendi, bey, beyefendi, paşa, hanım and hazretleri. These were rules about word forms. At the same time, Article 6 of the Regulation allowed a surname to be used alone or together with “(oğlu)”. That is worth keeping in mind, because title words in today's registers most often appear with -oğlu. The story of any single surname, though, can only be told from documents.

Three sub-groups

Old Turkic titles collect the vocabulary of the steppe states: han, hakan, kağan, tekin, tarhan, inal. Some of them occur in the Orkhon inscriptions and are far older than the Ottomans. Ottoman titles come from the language of administration and court: paşa, ağa, efendi, çelebi, kâhya, subaşı, kadı. Nickname surnames were given by no office at all. Words like deli, topal, çolak and köse were born in the street, the coffee house and the field. A title comes from above; a nickname comes from the neighbours. Before surnames, both did the same job: they told one family from another.

A few examples show the range. Han means ‘ruler’ and is a shortened form of kağan. Tekin carries Old Turkic tegin ‘prince’. Çelebi meant ‘refined, educated man’ in Ottoman usage; its origin is debated. Ağaoğlu joins ağa ‘elder, master’ to -oğlu. Köse is a man whose beard grows thin or not at all. Topaloğlu adds -oğlu to the nickname topal ‘lame’.

One rule holds on every page here. A surname that names a title gives the family no rank, and a surname that names a nickname says nothing about the family. Each one simply carries the history of a word.