In his introductory essay to an edited volume (2000) on questions of identity and multiculturalism in the context of Cypriot literature, Mehmet Yaşın coins the term ‘step-mothertongue’ to problematize the reifying processes of national literatures and canon formation. Namely, by questioning the monolingual, monolithic assumptions inherent in the concept of ‘mothertongue’, Yaşın seeks to overcome the restrictive borders of the national, and give legitimacy and intelligibility to a “multilingual and ‘uncanonized’ literature” found at the interstices of an “in-between literary region”—whether Turkish-Cypriot, Kurdish-Turkish, or otherwise. Using Yaşın’s formulation of ‘step-mothertongue’ as a point of departure, this paper constitutes a comparative study looking at key examples from the literary output of Mehmet Yaşın himself, alongside those of Kurdish-Turkish writer Yılmaz Odabaşı—each of them poets and novelists. By analyzing the linguistic (Turkish, Greek, Kurdish), generic (poetry, autobiography, fiction), and even textual (orthography, morphology) instability of their writings, I will explore how Yaşın and Odabaşı thematize the inarticulability of their work in locally specific ways (i.e. particular to Cyprus and Southeast Turkey/Diyarbakır, respectively) that undermine notions of a national Turkish literature narrowly defined. I will also consider the unique limitations of the transnational mode in the case of each writer, particularly in light of the shifting power dynamics that accompany literature written both within, and on the margins of, national literary corpuses, trends, and spaces.