Being multilingual is rarely conceived as a social circumstance that “minoritizes” a person or community, nor one that places the speaking subject in an adverse or restrictive relationship toward a given species of social capital. Yet the historical trajectory of language policy in the Republic of Turkey, the broader nationalization strategies that have subtended it, and the sometimes spectral, sometimes hegemonic interferences of English, French, Arabic, Kurdish, Ottoman, Hebrew, and German—to name only a few—conspire to make certain kinds of multilingual subjectivity a quite complex civic affair, in the social worlds of twenty-first century Turkish youth. The title of this paper, “In Lingual Lockdown” was the phrase one multilingual teenager in this study used to describe his own experience of negotiating this prismatic landscape of linguistic allegiances in early twenty-first century Anatolia. In this, he echoed the sentiments of Ahmet Ha?im, who wrote the following in 1928: “For the last three days, while I write, I watch curiously the grappling of alien words with the new letters on the white page.” (“Lisan imar?.” Ikdam 3 Dec. 1928.) This empirical, qualitative study, based primarily on the insights of Turkish students at an English-medium university in Central Anatolia in 2008, attempts to highlight how “becoming multilingual” in twenty-first century Turkey (as in many other statutorily non-anglophone spaces around the planet) itself epitomizes a certain political and epistemic positioning, rather than merely a private, subjective process of learning. The Turkish teenagers surveyed in this paper theorize their learning of non-Turkish languages collectively, politically, and historically. “Learning languages” is, for them, an event that overlaps and jostles with other historical events—whether the 1980 coup d’etat, the European Union accession debates, the legacy of US and NATO influence, cultural globalization, or the strategic re-engineering of the Turkish language over the course of the previous century.