- Turkish:
- Türkçe or Türkiye Türkçesi
Turkish language
Where is Turkish spoken?
What languages is Turkish related to?
What alphabet does Turkish use?
Turkish language, a major member of the Turkic language family within the Altaic language group. Turkish is spoken in Turkey (Türkiye), Cyprus, and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. With Gagauz, Azerbaijani (sometimes called Azeri), Turkmen, and Khorasan Turkic, it forms the southwestern, or Oğuz, branch of the Turkic languages. It has about 86 million native speakers worldwide, more than nine-tenths of whom live in Turkey.
The Altaic hypothesis—the idea that Turkic, Mongolic, and Manchu-Tungus languages are a language family that share a genetic relationship (along with Korean and Japanese in some formulations)—is controversial among linguists. Most scholars now reject the hypothesis, but some argue that the Altaic category remains useful as an areal grouping with noteworthy similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features explained by prolonged geographic proximity. Here, Altaic is discussed as a language group in recognition of the diversity of views in scholarship.
History
Modern Turkish is the descendant of Ottoman Turkish and its predecessor, so-called Old Anatolian Turkish, which was introduced into Anatolia by the Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century ce. Old Turkish gradually absorbed a great many Arabic and Persian words and even grammatical forms and was written in Arabic script. After the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet (1928). The reform of the language was initiated and supported by the Turkish republican government. In spite of disputes and resistance, the movement contributed greatly to ridding the Turkish vocabulary of many foreign elements. An essentially new literary language emerged, and the older one soon became obsolete.
From the point of view of linguistic development, four periods of Turkish may be differentiated: Old (Anatolian and Ottoman) Turkish, 13th–16th century; Middle (Ottoman) Turkish, 17th–18th century; Newer (Ottoman) Turkish, 19th century; and Modern Turkish, 20th century.
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Grammar
Turkish morphology is subject to sound harmony, of which palatal and labial vowel harmony is the most salient feature. Palatal harmony is based on a distinction between front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) and back vowels (a, ı, o, u). As a rule, all the vowels of a word belong to the same class (back or front)—e.g., sargı ‘bandage,’ sergi ‘exhibition’—and the vowels of suffixes vary according to the class of vowels in the primary stem—e.g., ev-de ‘in the house’ but oda-da ‘in the room.’ Turkish is an agglutinative language: Its morphology is marked by its tendency to expand the primary stem with different suffixes, of which many designate grammatical notions. Thus parasızlıklarından ‘because of their poverty’ is composed of para ‘money,’ -sız ‘-less,’ -lık ‘-ness,’ -lar = plural, ı(n) = possessive, -dan = ablative ‘from, due to.’
Syntactically, Turkish, like other Turkic languages, tends to use constructions with verbal nouns, participles, and converbs in cases where English would use constructions with subordinative conjunctions or relative pronouns—e.g., geleceğini biliyorum ‘I know that (s)he will come’ (literally ‘come-[future]-its-[accusative] know-[present]-I’), otelde kalan dostumuz ‘our friend who is staying in the hotel’ (literally ‘hotel-in staying friend-our’), and gülerek girdi ‘(s)he entered laughing’ (literally ‘laughing enter-[past]-(s)he’).