Turkish is a language spoken by between 90 and 110 million people and it is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages.
Turkish (Türkçe in Turkish), is the national language of Turkey (Türkiye) and Northern Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers are also present in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq and Syria. More than two million Turkish speakers live in Germany.
Turkish also has official status in 38 municipalities in Kosovo, two in North Macedonia and in the Kirkuk province in Iraq.
Mutual intelligibility and history
Map of Turkish dialects (Wikimedia Commons)
Turkish is spoken by the Turkish diaspora in around 30 countries in total. It is most similar to Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan, and Turkmen, spoken in Turkmenistan. Mutual intelligibility between Turkish and both Azerbaijani and Turkmen is very high, meaning Turks can understand both Azerbaijani and Turkmen people very well when they speak their native languages.
Map of Turkey with Turkish flag (Wikimedia Commons)
Minorities that speak Turkish in countries beyond Turkey primarily exist in countries that partly or wholly belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkish, the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire, spread as the empire expanded and conquered more territory.
The ancestors of Turkish people migrated from Central Asia to the land that Turkey occupies today.
Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic language family. Other members of this language family include Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Qashqai (spoken in southern Iran) and Turkmen.
Evolution
Some of the most seismic changes in the development of the Turkish language were the reforms made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an instrumental figure in the development of the Turkish language (Wikimedia Commons)
After the establishment of the first Turkish Republic in 1923, Atatürk was instrumental in the replacement of the Arabic script – the script which Turkish was previously written in – with the Latin alphabet. This change took place in 1928 and it contributed to the supposed purifying of Turkish vocabulary of foreign elements.
The Latin alphabet was also considered to be better-suited for the sounds used in the Turkish language.
However, inevitably, Turkish has been influenced linguistically by its neighbouring countries in addition to other European languages over the course of its history. Ottoman Turkish experienced a great influx of Persian and Arabic words while there are also many evident loanwords of French origin in the language spoken today.
Key language features
Some of the most important features of the Turkish language include the fact it is not a gendered language. Nouns do not have classes and words are not divided into gender unlike in many European languages.
Turkish is an agglutinative language. This means that it is a language in which adding different suffixes to words ultimately changes their meaning. Words are formed by adding suffixes to a root word. These suffixes are different letter combinations. Subsequently, phrases can occasionally be very long as they incorporate many details.
Turkish follows a subject-object-verb word order and it contains six cases, meaning words change form depending on their function in a sentence.
Turkey’s historical importance has also led to the Turkish language influencing the development of neighbouring languages. The languages Turkish has influenced the most include Arabic, Persian and Greek. Many loanwords from Turkish can be found in these languages.
If you liked this piece on the Turkish language, make sure to check out this post on Turkish cuisine, a sumptuous fusion of east and west.
