More culture mixing, please!

[Porsenna]

But I thought Italy was severely depopulated after the Gothic Wars, and that they Lombards flooded in as much-needed immigrants, bringing their culture and traditions?

I don't mean to argue; I'm no expert, but I'm just mentioning what I know.
I want to learn, too!

It's important to keep the populations being considered in perspective: "depopulated" is a comparison to the height of these areas under the Roman empire, a population of probably 6-7 million, maybe a bit higher; while the population had certainly dropped significantly, it would have still been in the millions, and the Lombards would have been moving in with a comparatively tiny population in the tens of thousands (perhaps up to a hundred thousand - but that estimate seems very much over the top). It's no surprise that Lombard language, and Germanic customs outside of a few dialectal and naming conventions disappear by only around 200 years after their conquest, and no surprise that urban civil republic tradition of Roman Italy eventually re-asserts itself.

There are some genetic studies that (In my opinion) can be taken as pretty accurate reflecting that the population of modern Italy is extremely contiguous with its ancient population - Romans, Etruscans, Umbrians, Oscans and so on. There is a spike of population from north of the Alps in Northern Italy (up to about 10% of the population), but so far as i know, its seen as more likely this is the remnant of the Celtic population*, or even slaves in Northern Italy than it is the Lombards.

*However, there is no clear cut way to define "Celtic population", particularly when defined against Italic populations. Celtic culture is very much that - a culture, and it spread and took hold over huge and disparate populations. Beyond that, the two have very close origins anyway, closer than the stereotype of lumping Celts with Germanic culture in the modern mind would have us believe.

I'm a bit more inclined to believe the ancient pop. information, just because populations who embrace being a warrior aristocracy over conquered peoples have a tendency to not pass on their genes nearly as well as a population that mixes freely, and because the raw demographic and cultural information supports the Lombards leaving a bigger political legacy than anything else.

 

[unmerged(73676)]

Well. In my Abyssinia game I've noticed Italian(ethnicity) and Ethiopian couples sometimes produce Turkish children. Is that a bug?

 

[cybrxkhan]

Well. In my Abyssinia game I've noticed Italian(ethnicity) and Ethiopian couples sometimes produce Turkish children. Is that a bug?

I'm assuming you have the African portraits DLC? It's WAD. Black parent + White parent = kid that's half way in between. Something like that.

It's not the same as culture mixing, though.

 

[unmerged(228153)]

Tutors can change their wards' culture and religion. If the children are tutored by a Turkish courtier, that's likely the cause of it. If you meant that they look Turkish, then cybrxkhan is right.

 

[Guinnessmonkey]

I think one way to add more culture mixing, is to add even more cultural divisions. So, perhaps Ulster-Irish and Munster-Irish are different and eventually get united into just plain Irish. Or maybe, something like Bavarian could be a Central German culture and some other cultures eventually mix into German.

On the flip side, perhaps if various kingdoms or duchies are independent, they eventually fracture back into these sub-cultures.

I'd also like to see hypothetical cultures emerge. So, I recently conquered the Byzantine Empire as the King of Italy and reformed Rome. Perhaps Latin-Greek should lead to a Roman culture re-emerging?

Frankly, while I'd LOVE a "Roman" culture, as it stands I'm kinda tempted to just change "Greek" to read "Roman". After all, didn't they call their language Ῥωμαιϊκή or "Romaiikē" ("Romeikos" in Google)?

Either way, I'd love to have an event or something that allows for a reformed empire to start pushing for cultural reunification... My preference would be one in which the various Romance dialects get pushed towards proper Latin culture/language with the East going to Greek/Roman/whatever-you-call-it. Regardless, in provinces where the population mostly speaks a semitic language (Arabic, etc), cultural conversion should be VERY slow (barring colonization events). You should end up with a ruling class that speaks Roman Greek and/or Latin but a populace speaking mostly Arabic/Aramaic/etc. After all, if you put a map of areas that spoke semitic languages thousands of years ago on top of one of the areas that speak one now, there wouldn't be that much difference between them. The main difference would be which languages are spoken (Egyptian Arabic instead of Coptic, Syrian Arabic instead of Aramaic, etc.).

Instead I turn the entire region Greek in a generation. If it's that easy, shouldn't it have been Greek since the days of Alexander? After centuries under the Ptolemy's, why was Alexandria the only city in Egypt where even a large percentage of the population spoke Greek?

The alternate/hypothetical cultures are really what I want.
However, the Romans conquered the Greeks. "Romans", if you consider the leading group to be of that culture, would be Italians. Since Rome didn't have a uniform culture, it would be strange to have one if it were formed again.

Rome didn't have a uniform culture, but I do see a reunified empire at least pushing Latin and Greek at the court level, and for more cultural uniformity for local rulers to come about over time. The splintering of Latin from having local dialects into having entire language families would start to be reversed, I'd think. After a few generations, the rulers of Roman-ruled Spain shouldn't be thinking of the guy in Constantinople or Rome as a "foreigner".

Can we also get something that stops cultures from changing or mixing as well? I hate when the Basques disappear in game or the Bohemians. There should be benefits to being a different cultures, or maybe lower crown authority removes the penalty for being of different cultures. As much as I love turning the entire eastern med. into a Greek sea it is ridiculous.

(also totally in favor of more melting pots)

Totally. I've had games where, in frustration, I've gone back and manually edited save games to restore most provincial cultures to the way they were at the start of the game. Heck, I think the level of cultural unity as it is is too much (German, for instance, should be split up into several parts, as several big mods do), but to see the entire HRE go "German" in a generation or two is just dumb. "German" Tuscany makes me sad, as does the huge swath of "Mongol" culture. How is Muscovy to dominate Russia in the future if surrendering to the Mongols soon sees you purged for being a nonbeliever, only for your province to be Mongol/Tengri (or whatever the Mongols are in your game) in a few years? The MTTH for the provincial conversion events needs to be multiplied several times over. You should be able to conquer a Catalan province as France at the beginning of the game and, in most games, see it stay Catalan for the entire game.

Melting pots sounds cool, but if I have to pick between the way it is now and just removing cultural conversion altogether, I think I'd pick the latter. Most of the big cultural conversions in this area I can think of either happen before the start of the game (the Hungarians moving in, for example, which is colonization instead of conversion) or after it (Andalusia, most of Turkey, French replacing Occitan, etc.). Heck, some of these cultures were conquered before the game starts and don't have an independent state until the 20th century, but retain their culture the entire time. In CK2 I had half of the Low Countries turn Greek in one generation. That hurts my brain.

the only thing I have an issue with is where it looks like there should be an obvious melting pot event but it doesnt occur... to this date Ive never seen a French culture emerge

Nor should you. Occitan remained the dominant language/culture in the south of France until the 19th century, even with centuries of centralized rule by Paris and actually outlawing the speaking of Occitan in school. IIRC, "French" didn't really become dominant until after WWI.





Edit: I guess to sum up most of my comments, I think the game needs to do a better job of understanding that there's an enormous difference between the culture of the rulers and the culture of the county itself. If either of these changes over time, historically it was the ruler's culture, not the provincial culture. Provincial cultures mostly changed only when another culture actually pushed out the people who had been living there (as happened in Turkey or the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain) or when the state grew powerful enough to impose it's culture from above (Southern France). This stuff should take a LONG, LONG time. Sure, there are crazy exceptions (Celtic languages being replaced by Latin ones in much of the Western Roman Empire), but they're kinda the exceptions that prove the rule (later Germanic conquerors of France or Spain started speaking Latin tongues, not the other way around, and Syria and Egypt never started speaking Greek. Instead the Semitic languages of Aramaic and Coptic were replaced by another Semitic language, Arabic. Though I think you can argue that culturally they stayed distinct to this day....). CK2 makes it about as easy to make Paris speak Greek as it is in EU3 to make a conquered colony switch to the new owner's culture... That's totally ahistorical and wrong.

I'm not even sure that culture mixing is the right way to go. Was the culture in Britain in the 1300's really a new mix of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French? Or was it just Anglo-Saxon with a few French words tossed in? How much had culture really changed for the average peasant? He still was ruled by an Earl, not a Count. He's still speaking a Germanic language. I mean, it's estimated that the Normans constituted about 8000 or so moving into a population somewhere between 1.25 and 2.25 million people. English is less a mixed-culture as it is just the later variant of the old. It is to Anglo-Saxon as Modern French is to Medieval French. So yhea. Maybe we need less cultural conversion altogether, with more events that lead the culture of the ruling class to migrate towards the culture of the top title: call yourself King of England and your son may become English. If you're an Irish count who inherits the Kingdom of Castile, your grandson will probably be speaking Castilian. Having Spain start speaking Irish just because you did is ludicrous. Modern states have trouble stomping out minority languages even when they have public education to help them try....

Edit 2: If anything, I'd like to see a system that simulates cultures splitting apart during this period. If Swabia is independent for a long period of time, perhaps "Swabian German" develops as a separate culture and language, much as what was essentially Southern Galician turns into Portuguese during the period...

 

[unmerged(73676)]

Didn't know African portraits dlc did that. Thanks for the responses.

 

[magritte2]

While I do tend to agree that it was historically far more common for the ruler to take on the culture of the subjects than the other way round, there were exceptions. The Romans managed to spread their language and yes, to a large extent their culture in the western Empire. Granted over a long time period, and I'm not sure how many people continued to speak Celtic languages well into the Roman period, but it was the Latin language that the Germanic conquerors eventually learned. The argument that the Roman empire didn't have a uniform culture is a bit of a red herring, in my opinion, since no nation of any size had a uniform culture prior to the 19th century. The other example that pops to mind is the Hungarian and Slavic peoples moving into the Balkans. Before we get into the "depopulation" argument, just like with the Lombards in Italy, I am skeptical that the numbers of invaders could have been anywhere near the indigenous population. And of course, the widespread prevalence of Arabic throughout North Africa in the middle East. Again, the invaders must have been vastly outnumbered by the people they ruled, and I'm not sure why their language and--to some degree--their culture was adopted.

 

[Porsenna]

While I do tend to agree that it was historically far more common for the ruler to take on the culture of the subjects than the other way round, there were exceptions. The Romans managed to spread their language and yes, to a large extent their culture in the western Empire. Granted over a long time period, and I'm not sure how many people continued to speak Celtic languages well into the Roman period, but it was the Latin language that the Germanic conquerors eventually learned. The argument that the Roman empire didn't have a uniform culture is a bit of a red herring, in my opinion, since no nation of any size had a uniform culture prior to the 19th century. The other example that pops to mind is the Hungarian and Slavic peoples moving into the Balkans. Before we get into the "depopulation" argument, just like with the Lombards in Italy, I am skeptical that the numbers of invaders could have been anywhere near the indigenous population. And of course, the widespread prevalence of Arabic throughout North Africa in the middle East. Again, the invaders must have been vastly outnumbered by the people they ruled, and I'm not sure why their language and--to some degree--their culture was adopted.

It probably helped that Punic was still probably widely used among North African populations as much as Latin (though North Africa proved a very fertile ground for many Latin grammarians) and as a Semitic language, would not have had much trouble adjusting to Arabic.

EDIT: similar to how the ancient Gallic language is surprisingly close to Latin, close enough to where it probably wasn't a huge leap to adopting Latin. The Celtic languages we have now are all descended from the fringe groups of the Celtic world, groups that themselves had large admixtures of pre-Celtic languages in them, and more isolation in which to develop on their own course.

EDIT 2: I'm also of the mind that Slavs were just extremely successful at cultural spread, and that the populations of these areas were probably mostly preserved during the period of Slavic invasion, and that the populations are largely contiguous.

 

[Guinnessmonkey]

It probably helped that Punic was still probably widely used among North African populations as much as Latin (though North Africa proved a very fertile ground for many Latin grammarians) and as a Semitic language, would not have had much trouble adjusting to Arabic.

EDIT: similar to how the ancient Gallic language is surprisingly close to Latin, close enough to where it probably wasn't a huge leap to adopting Latin. The Celtic languages we have now are all descended from the fringe groups of the Celtic world, groups that themselves had large admixtures of pre-Celtic languages in them, and more isolation in which to develop on their own course.

EDIT 2: I'm also of the mind that Slavs were just extremely successful at cultural spread, and that the populations of these areas were probably mostly preserved during the period of Slavic invasion, and that the populations are largely contiguous.

Yup. Where Arabic is spoken today is pretty much the same areas where other Semitic languages were spoken previously. The Punic as written in the Africa Province (modern Tunisia, essentially) is apparently readable to a modern Hebrew speaker without that much difficulty. "Arabs" in Iraq are speaking a language not that dissimilar to the Akkadian spoken in the region over 4,500 years ago. (again pointing out how my turning the area Greek in less than 40 years in my last game is totally ridiculous)

If you're interested in the whole, "why do some languages put down roots while others never really catch on" thing, I highly recommend Empires of the Word. Really awesome book. Either way, the way in which Celtic languages made way for Latin in the Empire (whereas Basque, Greek, Armenian, the various Semitic languages, various Germanic languages, etc. did not) is the big exception to the rule. Part of this may be that they weren't that far apart as language groups (whereas Basque, for example, isn't even an Indo-European Language, predating the arrival of the Indo-Europeans into what's now Europe, Iran, and northern India), but we don't really know for sure. We do know that Hispania took centuries before it totally settled down under Roman rule, whereas Gaul was mostly quiet once the Gallic Wars were over. Personally, I don't think it's anything to do with how brutal Caesar's conquests were or anything like that; Celts switched to Latin in other areas too (Gallic Spain became some of the most Latinized, etc.). Heck, some Gallic nobility seem to have switched to Latin even before they were conquered... For whatever reason the Gauls seemed ready to drop their language if given the chance. The book notes how weird this is, as just 500 years later the Irish and Welsh are writing so many of their tales and legends; obviously some of the Celts thought their culture was worth preserving... He also points to the way that the Romans took on much of Greek culture without it "capsizing" their culture as proof that the Gauls could have modernized and stayed Celtic if they wanted to. Instead they seem to have adopted Latin ways as quickly as possible. We're also not sure why Latin came to dominate in Gaul but proved transitory in Britain... Anyway....

 

[The_Blind_One]

The whole idea of melting pots is rather absurd.

People didn't just switch culture nilly willy whenever there was another dude ruling in the castle. The occitans in france never became french untill the 19th century with institutionalized education and governmental supression of the occitan language and public redicule. Most of the nobles in south france had french culture, yes, but the locals...didn't even understand what the french lord was saying.

When we talk about melting pots, what we are really talking about is the ruling class losing their original ethnicity due to local influences. However it is not prestigious to say you lost your roots. So they invent the idea of a melting pot. The local population stays almost exactly the same, except the nobility take on alot of local influences and combines them with their own. And when we have the nobility producing 95% of all historical documents for historians to read through today...I can say the evidence is biased quite absurdly in their favor.

The whole idea of cultures melting is strange to me if you consider that people almost never migrated to other areas. Most people lived their entire lives in the same town they grew up in. What is the french lord gonne do in my dutch backwater town? give me public education so I can speak proper french? Make sure I marry a french lady and produce melting pot babies? Teach me proper french customs and etiquette?

I think not. All the lord does is make sure the peasants work the land and he isn't too bothered by his liege.

But what does the lord do?

The lords are forced to interact with the locals, they marry local girls, or have a local mistress, they intermix with the population and slowly bit by bit local customs intermingle with the ruling classes. And they soon can no longer call themselves completely one or the other, but they certainly are not like the people they conquered, for to admit that would mean they are no longer of noble status and above them, but on par with them.

 

[Guinnessmonkey]

The whole idea of melting pots is rather absurd.

People didn't just switch culture nilly willy whenever there was another dude ruling in the castle. The occitans in france never became french untill the 19th century with institutionalized education and governmental supression of the occitan language and public redicule. Most of the nobles in south france had french culture, yes, but the locals...didn't even understand what the french lord was saying.

When we talk about melting pots, what we are really talking about is the ruling class losing their original ethnicity due to local influences. However it is not prestigious to say you lost your roots. So they invent the idea of a melting pot. The local population stays almost exactly the same, except the nobility take on alot of local influences and combines them with their own. And when we have the nobility producing 95% of all historical documents for historians to read through today...I can say the evidence is biased quite absurdly in their favor.

The whole idea of cultures melting is strange to me if you consider that people almost never migrated to other areas. Most people lived their entire lives in the same town they grew up in. What is the french lord gonne do in my dutch backwater town? give me public education so I can speak proper french? Make sure I marry a french lady and produce melting pot babies? Teach me proper french customs and etiquette?

I think not. All the lord does is make sure the peasants work the land and he isn't too bothered by his liege.

But what does the lord do?

The lords are forced to interact with the locals, they marry local girls, or have a local mistress, they intermix with the population and slowly bit by bit local customs intermingle with the ruling classes. And they soon can no longer call themselves completely one or the other, but they certainly are not like the people they conquered, for to admit that would mean they are no longer of noble status and above them, but on par with them.

Totally agree.

The lord has little ability (or desire, really) to change the culture of their peasants. All it takes is for one of your heirs to really bond with their nursemaid, or befriend the blacksmith's boy, or whatever and you may end up with an heir that starts speaking one language at court and the local dialect at home. A generation more and you may have an heir that makes the local dialect the language of their court.

Just because the Anglo-Saxons picked up a few bits of French vocabulary (works that, for the most part, your average peasant could go their whole lives without needing to know, as there were perfectly good words in their own language for those things) doesn't mean that English is a melting-pot language, half Anglo-Saxon and half French. It's just Anglo Saxon, but after hundreds of years of evolution.

Frankly, I'd say the biggest change to English is one that's really just finish up nowadays; we've almost totally gotten rid of having separate pronouns for formality or familiarity, with the formal words (you, your) remaining and the informal ones (thou, thee, thy). Originally "you" was the objective form of "ye" (which was considered more formal), while "thee" was the objective form of "thou" (which was considered more informal and intimate). Ironically, we now only seem to keep "thee" and "thou" around in formal settings, like translations of the Bible, and we associate it with formality in Shakespeare. ("Whom" also seems to be near total death these days, which is fine with me...)

Ok, that was my totally random non-sequitur of the day... Sorry, I'm married to a linguistics nerd, so she talks about language development stuff a lot...

 

[cybrxkhan]

I agree with the two previous posts - even if we consider culture of provinces to be the culture of the upper-class nobility or the middle-class merchants at worst, the game's current mechanics are kind of funky. In the game, it's the lord who changes the locals' culture - it should be in fact the opposite, or it should not happen at all.

 

[Tapscott]

I always read the melting pot event as being not the entire peasentry(?) changing culture, but rather the local lords.

 

[magritte2]

The peasantry probably didn't change culture (or did so very, very slowly), but at this time, I'm not sure the peasantry even had a regional culture. Local dialects may have been so strong that a peasant from Languedoc might not have found a peasant from Armagnac much more intelligible than the French-speaking lord. And the lords didn't have much reason to talk to the peasant farmers--they talked to the servants, they talked to innkeepers, they talked to merchants, craftsman--people who provided services they wanted. And those people may not have traveled themselves, but they did speak to people who did travel. And how did they talk to them? Probably in much the same way that ex-pat Americans and Brits who've lived in Egypt for years talk to shopkeepers. With a kindergarten vocabulary in Arabic sprinkled with English words. And if you look at English, that's pretty much what it is. Our pronouns, conjunctions, common simple verbs, greetings--the kinds of things you'd learn in a first year language course--mostly come from Anglo Saxon. The structure of the language is Anglo-Saxon. But if you try to say something in English without using any latin-root words, I think you'll find you're quite limited in the concepts you can get across. I find it really hard to believe that Anglo-Saxon would naturally have incorporated a vocabulary that is nearly 30% French (and more than half Latin-derived, though that's counting a lot of scientific words) if it hadn't been for the conquest. English has been so transformed by borrow words that on another thread people were commenting that old English is more intelligible to speakers of other Germanic languages than it is to English speakers. Whether you want to call it a melting pot or not, there is a substantive difference between that and the Lombards in Italy.

 

[Guinnessmonkey]

The peasantry probably didn't change culture (or did so very, very slowly), but at this time, I'm not sure the peasantry even had a regional culture. Local dialects may have been so strong that a peasant from Languedoc might not have found a peasant from Armagnac much more intelligible than the French-speaking lord. And the lords didn't have much reason to talk to the peasant farmers--they talked to the servants, they talked to innkeepers, they talked to merchants, craftsman--people who provided services they wanted. And those people may not have traveled themselves, but they did speak to people who did travel. And how did they talk to them? Probably in much the same way that ex-pat Americans and Brits who've lived in Egypt for years talk to shopkeepers. With a kindergarten vocabulary in Arabic sprinkled with English words. And if you look at English, that's pretty much what it is. Our pronouns, conjunctions, common simple verbs, greetings--the kinds of things you'd learn in a first year language course--mostly come from Anglo Saxon. The structure of the language is Anglo-Saxon. But if you try to say something in English without using any latin-root words, I think you'll find you're quite limited in the concepts you can get across. I find it really hard to believe that Anglo-Saxon would naturally have incorporated a vocabulary that is nearly 30% French (and more than half Latin-derived, though that's counting a lot of scientific words) if it hadn't been for the conquest. English has been so transformed by borrow words that on another thread people were commenting that old English is more intelligible to speakers of other Germanic languages than it is to English speakers. Whether you want to call it a melting pot or not, there is a substantive difference between that and the Lombards in Italy.

A difference, sure, but enough to justify changing the culture of the provinces?

Regardless, England aside, is there any real justification for cultural conversion in the rest of the map as it exists now?

 

[cybrxkhan]

Regardless, England aside, is there any real justification for cultural conversion in the rest of the map as it exists now?

Now that I think about it, in *some* parts of the map, definitely. Historically, for instance, the Turkification of Anatolia is more or less represented with current game mechanics - that is, many of the people in modern-day Anatolia simply assimilated into the Muslim Turco-Persian culture of their overlords, to a great extent. Another example would be the settlement of Germans in the eastern border regions of the Holy Roman Empire (into places like Silesia). And yet another example would be how Nubia, by the very end of CKII's time frame, would be Arabcized and Islamified (are those even real words?).

However, the way it currently works is way too fast and way too easily. You see entire cultures disappearing within a few generations, which is nonsensical.

 

[The_Blind_One]

Now that I think about it, in *some* parts of the map, definitely. Historically, for instance, the Turkification of Anatolia is more or less represented with current game mechanics - that is, many of the people in modern-day Anatolia simply assimilated into the Muslim Turco-Persian culture of their overlords, to a great extent. Another example would be the settlement of Germans in the eastern border regions of the Holy Roman Empire (into places like Silesia). And yet another example would be how Nubia, by the very end of CKII's time frame, would be Arabcized and Islamified (are those even real words?).

However, the way it currently works is way too fast and way too easily. You see entire cultures disappearing within a few generations, which is nonsensical.

Nubia wasn't arabicized by the end. It was however islamicized. The process of islamization (even a word?) incorporates the concept of giving up ones previous ethnicity and joining the muslim dhumma (a concept of a unified islamic society, this creates the false presumption of arabization). Many converts to islam give up their old family names and adopt new names. The process of islamization thus creates an entirely new group of people with a different concept of ethnicity. This process was spearheaded by the arab nobility ruling mostly from the fortified cities and towns. The local nobles became muslim and intermarried with their arab overlords adopting some culture and intermingling. They often started calling themselves arabs because...as in my previous post, you do not want to associate yourself with being a conquered people. Instead you are the conqueror, the one with a right to rule. Since speaking and being arab was fashionable at the time, most early converts quickly adopted arab names and intermingled to a degree. Arab language became a lingua franca and well, when ur speaking arab and ur trying to imitate arabs. You might as well call yourself an arab no?

The idea even today that most of north africa is arabicized is rediculous. Just because you speak arab and had rulers with arab lineage does not mean you are arab...

The arab rulers back in the 10th and 11th century were pissed as hell on all the converts becoming muslim and adopting arab names. Not only did the sultan lose precious dhimmi taxation, he was also pained by the idea that these people started calling themselves arabs despite not having any arab blood. So alot of arab rulers started forbidding these practices and some even continued to levy dhimmi taxation on an already converted people...

Other rulers embraced the fact that they started calling themselves arabs and saw it as a general positive trend towards a unified islamic society.

 

[cybrxkhan]

^You're right about that, that slipped my memory. If we go by the game's logic, "Maghreb Arabic" is really a "melting pot" of Berber and Arabic "culture" - whatever the heck that would mean.

 

[Guinnessmonkey]

^You're right about that, that slipped my memory. If we go by the game's logic, "Maghreb Arabic" is really a "melting pot" of Berber and Arabic "culture" - whatever the heck that would mean.

Similarly, I'm not so sure that situations like the Turks in Anatolia aren't better served by an event... Large chunks of the Anatolian population considered themselves Roman/Greek/etc. until the 20th century. That's it's thoroughly "Turkified" these days is partly the result of population transfers after WWI.

That said, there were large numbers of Turks who moved into the area, essentially colonizing it. I don't know enough details, however, to know just how many Turks moved in and what the local Greek/Anatolian/whatever population was. Were the "Turkified" areas the areas left depopulated where Turkish colonists became an actual majority?

Either way, if we use current mechanics you'll see the entire area Turkified in a matter of years. Frankly, I'd be surprised if more than a handful of these provinces were really all that Turkish even by the end of the period (remember, some of these cultural shifts are also taking place in the EU3 1453-1820 period....).

 

[The_Blind_One]

^You're right about that, that slipped my memory. If we go by the game's logic, "Maghreb Arabic" is really a "melting pot" of Berber and Arabic "culture" - whatever the heck that would mean.

I know quite a few north africans who hate the fact that there are still people who call themselves berbers in africa. They consider them uneducated and backwards because these fringe berbers primarely never adopted arab names and customs and held out much longer against islamication and are therefore looked down upon by the ex-berbers who now call themselves arabs or by another imaginary muslim ethnicity. History is weird like that...lol