rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Turkish sex worker dialect Lubunca liberates, stigmatizes LGBT community" (Reply)

Al Jazeera's Dalia Mortada reported on Lubunca, a language form of GLBT people in Istanbul that sounds quite a lot like it played the role of London's Polari.

To keep out of trouble, the residents of Ulker Street used code words that make up a slang called Lubunca. That is how they communicated in front of police and clients, effectively speaking a secret language that outsiders could not understand. Lubunca, for many, became the language of Ulker Street.

The earliest traces of Lubunca can be found about 100 years ago, as the Ottoman Empire was waning, says Nikolas Kontovas, a sociohistoric linguist who has studied the origins of Lubunca. While there are few records of the argot back then, Lubunca was found in spaces where men engaged in sex work, such as bathhouses.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s and early ’90s that Lubunca became more prevalent, along with trans sex work. Eventually, the spaces where Lubunca was used expanded into unregistered brothels and their neighborhoods, where male and trans sex workers interacted with minority communities like the city’s Roma and Greeks or musicians and other artistic groups. “There is lots of Romani. A lot of the vocabulary [of Lubunca] overlaps with Romani,” Kontovas says.

He explains that the argot is deeply tied to its function. “Unsurprisingly, a large portion of the lexicon is devoted to sex. Sex acts are one of the largest categories, if not the largest … There’s also tons of vocabulary for money,” he says, and for what he likes to call fun, like alcohol and cigarettes. Lubunca does not exist just for its own sake, he said. It exists because it’s needed.

Kılıç describes the kinds of words most prevalent in daily use — prices, sex positions, descriptions of customers. “‘Kurdan’ is the Turkish word for ‘toothpick,’ but [in Lubunca] it also means ‘a guy with little money,’” she says. “We called the police ‘paparon,’” she says, explaining that police are their biggest threat, detaining unregistered prostitutes for days if caught.