Turkish Language

Turkish is a language, spoken by nearly 220 million people in the world. Speakers are located predominantly in Turkey, with smaller groups in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uigur, Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, other parts of Europe and Central Asia.

Turkish is also spoken by large emigrant communities and by the Turkish population remaining in Eastern European countries after the extinction of the Ottoman Empire, including Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. Some of its major linguistic particularities are vowel harmony and extensive suffixes.

Official Language

Turkish is the official language of Turkey. It’s also official in Northern Cyprus, being co-official for Cyprus together with Greek. At a regional or partial level, Turkish is official in Kosovo and Macedonia. Large communities of ethnic Turkish population inhabit the Slavic countries, which were formerly included in the Ottoman Empire, and Turkish is spoken there.

Varieties

Standard Turkish is based on the Istanbul dialect. Since the reform undertaken by MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK in the beginning of the 20th Century, Standard Turkish uses the Istanbul variety, a phonetic version of the Latin alphabet and a purified version of the vocabulary (where many of the old loanwords from Arab and Persian do not exist.). Several distinct dialects of Turkish exist, in our country.

Brief History

The History of Turkish can be traced more than 1,200 years back. At that time, the Turkish linguistic community inhabited the territory of today's Mongolia. The development of Old Turkish was strongly marked by the gradual impact of Persian and Arab, not only in terms of vocabulary, but also sentence construction,spelling etc.

.

The Orhun Tablets are the ones on which you can see the word TÜRK for the first time nearly 1300 years ago

The expansion of Turks and the Turkish Language

The next stage, and maybe the most significant, is the period of Ottoman Turkish. It coincided with the historical existence of the Ottoman Empire, which gradually enlarged to encompass the entirety of Eastern Europe.

At that time, Turkish also suffered the impact of local linguistic communities, mainly Slavic, but also from Greek and other languages.

In the beginning of the 20th Century, the greatest Turkish leader, MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATURK, undertook critical reforms of the state of Turkey, aiming to establish both a strong and independent national identity and a less religious-dominated perception of the world. He adopted many of the achievements of Western Civilization. As for the language, the reform eliminated the old Arabic-based alphabet for the sake of a new phonetic version of the Latin alphabet. It also aimed to re-establish Turkish equivalents for old loanwords from Arab and Persian. Since then, the official version of Standard Turkish is based on the dialect of Istanbul.

A very ancient language, Turkish belongs to the Altaic group of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. The first known written records date back nearly 1,300 years.

With a few exceptions, the main features which distinguish the Altaic languages from Indo-European are as follows:

Vowel harmony is a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues.

No gender.

Suffixes.

Adjectives precede nouns.

Verbs come at the end of the sentence.

THE TURKİSH ALPHABET

A B C Ç D E F G Ğ H I İ J K L M N O Ö P R S Ş T U Ü V Y Z

a b c ç d e f g ğ h ı i j k l m n o ö p r s ş t u ü v y z

Turkish is a phonetic language. This basically means that it is spoken the way it is written, and vica versa. To accomplish that, in 1928 MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK introduced a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet. The letters Q, W and X were removed and 7 new, rather exotic looking characters were introduced: ç, ğ, ş, ö, ü and ı (undotted i). As a result, the Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters — eight vowels and twenty-one consonants.

Some Examples of Turkish words

These are our names and their meanings:

Please repeat after me;

Deniz (Sea), Bilgehan (Wiseman), Göktuğ (Sky Blue feather), Cansu (water that gives life), Barış (Peace)

And our teachers;

İpek (Silk), Alev (Flame), Savaş (War)

Loanwords Of Italian OriginMakine BastonBilançoKantoKaskoKunduraLokantaMakarnaOltaPeçetePusula Üniforma

İnternet Çizburger HamburgerFast foodMuffinFutbol PlatformKovboy

AmigoCunta Kanarya MandalinaPatatesPuro

Loanwords Of English Origin

Loanwords Of Spanish Origin

These are some of the Turkish words that you can see ın most of the places in the world

Baklava

YoğurtKebap