P nar Kasapoğlu Akyol
164
tenderness, evidence of care and affection. Lullabies are a useful "communication tool"
between mother and baby to improve interaction between them and teach the babies their
mother tongue. Lullabies are a “social and cultural codes treasure” that has a group of cultural
and social messages, which are totally accepted in society. Cultural education starts with these
cultural codes via lullabies (Kaya & Özkut, 2016).
Lullabies are also used as a "psychotherapy" application.
Lullabies also reflect
mothers` thoughts and feelings at that moment. With this way lullabies help the mother to be
relaxed and to get out of everything in her. She does not think about social pressure or social
control and just be herself
. It is seen easily that this overlaps one of the William Bascom`s
functions: “maintaining conformity to the accepted patterns of behavior” (1964, p. 346). Also
Hawes includes the same function in her article and adds that the American mothers also
express their feelings and thoughts with lullabies. Hawes points out that raising independent,
powerful and successful individuals is mothers’ task in the USA. From the end of the process
of pregnancy, mothers completely separated from their babies and during the “postpartum
depression” period they have really hard time emotionally (Tezel, 2008, p.185). The words in
lullabies that mothers say to their babies are actually the words they say to themselves.
Lullabies express the feelings and thoughts of them during the time they try to adjust that big
separation (1974).
Besides all of these positive functions of singing a lullaby to a baby which can be also
observed easily, also in Karakaya’s article it is summarized some of positive results of
lullabies on babies and mothers: In psychological context, it is relaxing, reassuring, inspiring,
motivating and deterrent; biologically, it helps baby to grow up; in medical sense, it blocks
some of the disorders; in terms of education it contributes to socialize of the child and to have
multi-faceted education; it improves the aesthetic sense of art and literature; it helps to
strength the material and spiritual ties with the mother; it develops the language ability in
verbal and nonverbal communication; in religious context it enhances the belief (
Karakaya,
2004). Also, Karagöz and İşcan in their article add very similar results of lullabies especially
in
linguistic, cognitive, dynamic and social-emotional development areas (2016).
2. What Is Ninni (Lullaby)?
The term
lullaby reflects in
Turkish culture as ninni. Âmil Çelebioğlu defines ninni like this:
“It is a balad which is sung by a mother with a specific tune to at least two-three months of
age to three-four years of age of a child to make him/her sleep easily or stop his/her crying. It
is generally written in
mani (a very common traditional Turkish quatrain form), also reflects
mother’s psychological situation at that moment” (1995, p. 9).
When the word
“ninni” or
“nenni” entered our language is not known exactly, but
Âmil Çelebioğlu points out in his book
The Treasure of Lullabies (Türk Ninniler Hazinesi),
that
the word of ninni was used as
“balu balu” in the Kashgarli Mahmut`s famous dictionary
Divanu Lügat-it Türk in XIth century and also, in one of the Karacaoğlan’s stanzas as
“nen
eylemek” in the XVIth century (1995).
If we look at the other languages for meaning of ninni, we found out similar sounds.
For example, ninni means
wiegenlied in German,
nina in Albanian,
berceuse in French,
lullaby in English,
ninna, ninne, nenia in Italian,
lenes nenice, noenia in Latin,
nannarismata,
nani in Greek,
yankanye in Russian, and
nanni in Bulgarian (Çelebioğlu, 1995). Also,
especially in Western languages besides lyrics parts of lullabies, humming parts generally
have such as
loo-loo, lalla, lullay, ninna-nanna, bo-bo, do-do syllabuses (Çelebioğlu, 1995).
When Anatolia and Turkish dialects is taken into consideration, the following
information also presents: The word of
ninni in Turkey Turkish and Cyprus can be found as
nen, nenni, ninna, ela (around Erzurum, Erzincan), in Azerbaijan Turkish as
layla, laylay; in