You're very close to the truth in a way I (a Turkish speaker) did not even notice until now about my own handwriting. Turns out, I'm using << >> when I quote on

You're very close to the truth in a way I (a Turkish speaker) did not even notice until now about my own handwriting. Turns out, I'm using << >> when I quote on pen and paper, and I use "" digitally. I had always thought that it was a weird stylistic choice on the part of the teacher that taught me writing in primary school, or that I had somehow 'corrupted' "" into super-elongated << and >> to be able to more clearly denote the beginning of a quote from its end marker. Only now I'm realising I've in fact been taught to use guillemets and it took me only two and a half decades! In hindsight, my primary school teacher was already about to retire when I was learning to write, so it's likely that she had been brought up in a much earlier school of style than one that is being taught now. Considering that Turkish has been shedding its Francophone writing style [0][1] for a while now, I consider it an echo of a bygone era. That said, Turkish still considers French its 'official' interface to Indo-European words, and there exists a structure that can convert any French word into a valid Turkish one. A simple example: London in Turkish is Londra — it sounds exactly the same as Londres spoken by a French speaker. A more recent example is Pope Francis, whose Turkish name is Papa Fransua, which sounds exactly the same as Papa François as it would be in French. Basically, the 'method' involves saying what you want in French and encoding it with Turkish ortography, and then it's a valid Turkish word. [2] [0] Another one of these Francophone stylings is the tradition to capitalise the surnames, like Amelie POULAIN, or Bora ALTUNİZADE, which has been considered outdated for a decade or two. [1] Writing style is moving towards Britain, but not words — 11% of modern Turkish vocabulary is still directly from French, second only to ancient Turkish from 11th century. [2] Famously, Turkish alphabet contains the letter J solely to be able to encode French words with the correct sound — the J sound does not otherwise appear in any Turkish word, only in words derived from French. Outside of French words, Turkish retains the original Latin J sound that is also used in German, which is a Y sound, so it gets encoded as Y in ortography, removing the need for letter J. For example, Joseph in Turkish becomes Yusuf, Johannes becomes Yuhanna.