Turkish language

Turkish language
Name	Turkish
Nativename	Türkçe
Pronunciation	[ˈtyɾctʃe]
States	Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, Romania, Kosovo
Region	Anatolia, Balkans, Cyprus, Caucasus
Ethnicity	Turkish people
Speakers	~90 million
Date	2024
Familycolor	Altaic
Fam1	Turkic
Fam2	Common Turkic
Fam3	Oghuz
Fam4	Western Oghuz
Script	Latin (Turkish alphabet)
Nation	Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus
Minority	Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Iraq, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Romania
Iso1	tr
Iso2	tur
Iso3	tur
Glotto	nucl1301
Glottorefname	Turkish
Lingua	part of 44-AAB-a
Mapcaption	Official language, Recognized minority language

Turkish language. It is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with approximately 90 million native speakers. Its modern standard form is the official language of Turkey and one of the official languages of Cyprus. The language is characterized by vowel harmony, extensive agglutination, and a lack of grammatical gender.

History

The history is divided into several periods, with its earliest attested form being Old Turkic, the language of the Göktürks and the Orkhon inscriptions found in Mongolia. This evolved into Middle Turkic, used during the time of the Seljuk Empire and in works like Mahmud al-Kashgari's Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk. The Ottoman Turkish period, heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic, was the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. Following the collapse of the empire, the language reform initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish Language Association in the 1920s and 1930s purged many loanwords and replaced the Ottoman Turkish alphabet with a modified Latin script.

Classification and related languages

It is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. Its closest relatives are Azerbaijani, spoken primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran, and Turkmen, the official language of Turkmenistan. Other Oghuz languages include Gagauz, spoken in Gagauzia in Moldova, and the Khorasani Turkic dialects of Iran. More distantly, it is related to languages like Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Tuvan.

Geographic distribution

It is predominantly spoken in Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant diaspora communities exist in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, largely due to the labour migration of the 1960s. It retains official minority status in several Balkan countries, including North Macedonia, Romania, and Kosovo, remnants of Ottoman rule. Smaller speaker communities are also found in Bulgaria, Greece, Iraq, and the Caucasus region.

Phonology

The sound system features extensive vowel harmony, where vowels within a word agree in being either front or back. The consonant inventory includes a distinction between voiceless and voiced stops, and notable consonants are the voiceless palatal stop and the voiced velar fricative. A characteristic feature is the final-obstruent devoicing, where voiced stops at the end of a word become voiceless. Stress is generally on the final syllable of a word, though there are numerous exceptions, particularly in place names like İstanbul and loanwords.

Grammar

It is a highly agglutinative language, forming words and expressing grammatical relationships through the sequential addition of suffixes to a root. There is no grammatical gender and no definite article. The basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb. The language employs an evidential mood, where the suffix -mış indicates that the speaker did not witness the event directly. Noun cases include nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, and ablative.

Vocabulary

Modern vocabulary has two primary strata: native Turkic words and loanwords. The 20th-century language reform led by the Turkish Language Association successfully replaced many Persian and Arabic loans with words derived from Turkic roots or with new coinages. However, many such loanwords remain in common use. It has also borrowed from other languages, notably French for technical and cultural terms, and more recently from English. The numeral system is exclusively Turkic in origin.

Writing system

Since 1928, it has been written using a modified Latin script known as the Turkish alphabet, introduced by the language reform. This alphabet replaced the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which was a version of the Perso-Arabic script. The modern alphabet consists of 29 letters, with several additions like Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş, and Ü to represent sounds not found in the standard Latin alphabet. The script is almost perfectly phonemic, with a consistent one-letter-to-one-sound correspondence.