A sociolinguistic study of Turkish oath terms

Language is the phenomenon that cannot be thought apart from society. At this sense the characters of societies more or less and diversely reflect on languages up to a certain extent. These features can differ within the scope of some variables. Some of these variables are age, gender, social class, ethnicity, social networks and so on. Sociolinguistics focuses on how, why and to what extent these variables occur. Oaths are the terms commonly used by many societies to build trust, make someone believe and persuade. For Turkish people to face up with this term starts from early childhood in primary schools with the `Turkish National Oath? and lasts until having a job. Dealing with lack of trust, a feeling mostly come out in modern societies; can be possible by means of oaths. In other words, oaths are commonly used as a strategy to come over lack of communication. In this study the relationship between language and society is examined by means of `oath terms?. For this study qualitative research method is used by putting sociolinguistics variables like gender, social class, ethnicity and age into consideration. A questionnaire is applied on 154 attendants from Dicle University students and the outputs of this questionnaire is assessed via SPSS 19 data analyse program. As a result of the study, the religious items, which are very effective social items for Turkish society, are demonstrating a structural relationship with oath terms. In addition to that, one of the commonly used reasons to take oaths is `to make others believe? after the assessment of the data collected. This situation puts forward that there is a meaningful tie between using oath terms and constructing trust. Key Words: Sociolinguistics, oath, gender, age, social class, ethnicity