As I remember, multilingualism hasn’t provided me many benefits, if anything, it was a problem. Learning Kurdish gave me a fake advantage, it enabled me to skip the meaningless discrimination against Arab and to prove myself as a Kurd. Turkish specifically wasn’t useful, when I learned it, it was an intellectual advantage to those Turks who appreciate someone learning their language (many Turks assume that Iraqis should normally speak Turkish though), then speaking Turkish became a stamp for refugees who spent many years in Turkey and who are less popular and more hated among Turks. This time speaking Turkish almost caused me a real problem.
In Sabiha Gokcen airport in the Asian side of Istanbul, I found a new layer of checking UK biometric residency permits (BRP) before boarding. An employee from a company called Gozen received my BRP and my passport, but she forgot everything and focused on my Turkish, “why do you speak Turkish?”.
I answered that I just learned it.
Are you Turkmen?
No
Have you lived here?
Not more than a month, that was in 2014
Why did you learn Turkish?
For talking with friends and listening to songs
Have you worked here or with Turks?
No
Do you have any other documents from UK? Something from NHS for example?
I told her that I have these documents but in soft copies only. I kept very calm, but I got lost in my phone, not being able to find the right folder. And while I was turning the laptop on to get to the files faster, the more senior employee returned my passport and BRP back wishing me a happy flight but he also asked while smiling: “why do you speak Turkish?”
What happened simply is that the profile of a non-Turkmen Iraqi who speaks Turkish means that the person is a refugee who spent many years in Turkey and probably traveling to Europe via fake travel documents, which triggered all the danger alerts to that employee until more senior one was able to validate the BRP. He then tagged it with some number, and that probably was a message to the British immigration officer who unusually was testing my language as if I am arriving to the country for the first time. He asked me many questions including a question about my work, I said that I work in a bank, then he said what type of bank, commercial or [something else I don’t remember], I mentioned the bank name, he then said that he had a bank account their 115 years ago and kept staring at me, until I smiled, indicating that I understood the joke, then he stamped the passport and let me go.
Note about Turkish translation: despite what happened and the very limited usage of Turkish in my life, I’ll keep it within my mind properties, I’ll even try to make it better, therefore, this will be the first article I write in Turkish, no one would proofread it, but I’ll see if Google translate is able to understand it then others may be able to understand it too. I needed the dictionary for many words, and many sentences were just like puzzles for me, a friend who learns Japanese told me the same about Japanese, that the language of books and articles is completely different, Turkish (which is far relative to Japanese) has the same issue, but let’s see.