Turkish ( , , also known as 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 21st-most spoken language in the world.

To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with the Latin script-based Turkish alphabet.

Turkish grammar is characterized by extensive agglutination and is generally very regular. The basic word order is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. Other notable grammatical features include evidentiality, converbs, and a variety of tenses, aspects, and moods.

Turkish phonology is marked by vowel harmony; native words typically contain only front vowels () or only back vowels (), a phenomenon known as palatal harmony. In addition, certain suffixes exhibit a fourfold harmony that also includes rounding harmony among high vowels. While most suffixes agree with vowel harmony, there are some exceptions. Loanwords are not required to follow this rule.

Turkish has a word accent system that has been described as either stress- or pitch-based. Most native words are accented on the last syllable, though this can vary due to suffixes. Meanwhile, loanwords vary considerably in this regard.

Over 80% of Turkish vocabulary stems from native Turkic, with significant contributions from Ottoman-era Arabic, French, and Persian loanwords, as well as smaller contributions from Italian, Greek, and English. Many loanwords, especially those from Arabic, were replaced by Turkish coinages during the Turkish language reform due to prevailing ideas of linguistic purism.

The language makes usage of honorifics and has a strong T–V distinction which distinguishes varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms can be used for referring to a single person out of respect.

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family. Other members include Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and north-west Iran, Gagauz of Gagauzia, Qashqai of south Iran, and Turkmen of Turkmenistan.Aalto, P. "Iranian Contacts of the Turks in Pre-Islamic times", in Studia Turcica, ed. L. Ligeti, Budapest, 1971, pp. 29–37.

Historically, the Turkic language family was considered part of the larger Altaic language family, along with the Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic language families. Some linguists have also proposed including other language families.Benzing, J. Einführung in das Studium der altäischen Philologie und der Turkologie, Wiesbaden, 1953.

The Altaic theory has fallen out of favour since the 1960s, and a majority of linguists now consider Turkic languages to be unrelated to any other language family, though the Altaic hypothesis still has a small degree of support from individual linguists. The nineteenth-century Ural-Altaic theory, which grouped Turkish with Finnish, Hungarian and Altaic languages, is considered even less plausible in light of Altaic's rejection.Gandjeï, T. "Über die türkischen und mongolischen Elemente der persischen Dichtung der Ilchan-Zeit", in Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 30, 1958, pp. 229–31. The theory was based mostly on the fact these languages share three features: agglutination, vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender.

History

The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the Second Turkic Khaganate (dated 682–744 CE). After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Old Turkic alphabet, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.

With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages (–11th centuries), peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia, covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia all the way to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language—into Anatolia during the 11th century. Also during the 11th century, an early linguist of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk ().

Ottoman Turkish

Following the adoption of Islam around the year 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of Persian poetic meters and a great quantity of imported Persian words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (–1922) is termed Ottoman Turkish, which borrowed heavily from Persian and Arabic that differed considerably from today's modern Turkish, was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as or 'vulgar Turkish', spoken by the less-educated, lower and also rural members of Ottoman society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as the basis for the modern Turkish language.

While visiting the region between Adıyaman and Adana, Evliya Çelebi recorded the "Turkman language" and compared it with his own Turkish: + Comparison of 17th-century Southern Anatolian Turkman, 17th-century elite, and modern standard Turkish dialects Turkman language Ottoman Turkish Modern Turkish English prophet imam mighty God mosque mosque , , , , bread, lavash, boortsog wine Where were you? Where are you going? Will you wear ? My stomach hurt. He/She/It became urban.

Language reform and modern Turkish

After the foundation of the modern state of Turkey and the script reform, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origins with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries. In 1935, the TDK published a bilingual Ottoman-Turkish/Pure Turkish dictionary that documents the results of the language reform.

Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic and Persian origins, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used the formal style of Ottoman Turkish that had been common at the time amongst statesmen and the educated strata of society in the setting of formal speeches and documents. After the language reform, the Turkish education system discontinued the teaching of literary Ottoman Turkish, and over time the speaking and writing ability of society atrophied to the point that later generations of Turkish speakers would perceive the speech as sounding so alien that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.

The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as Turkic to replace the Arabic-derived , ("political party")—also failed to meet with popular approval (the Arabic loanword has been replaced by the French loanword ).

Some examples of modern Turkish words and the old loanwords are:

Ottoman Turkish Modern Turkish English translation Ottoman etymology Modern derivation () triangle Arabic () Compound of the noun ('three') and the suffix () aeroplane Arabic (), 'birds, flying' Derived from the verb ('to fly'). The word was first proposed to mean "airport". () ratio Arabic () The old word is still used in the language today together with the new one. The modern word is from the Old Turkic verb ('to cut'). () north Persian (), 'north' Derived from the Old Turkic noun ('cold and dark place', 'shadow'). The word is restored from Middle Turkic usage. () October Arabic (), 'autumn' + 'the first [month of]' The noun means 'sowing', referring to the planting of cereal seeds in autumn, which is widespread in Turkey

Geographic distribution

Turkish is natively spoken by the Turkish people in Turkey and by the Turkish diaspora in some 30 other countries. The Turkish language is mutually intelligible with Azerbaijani. In particular, Turkish-speaking minorities exist in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Iraq, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece (primarily in Western Thrace), the Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. More than two million Turkish speakers live in Germany; and there are significant Turkish-speaking communities in the United States, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Due to the cultural assimilation of Turkish immigrants in host countries, not all ethnic members of the diaspora speak the language with native fluency.

In 2005, 93% of the population of Turkey were native speakers of Turkish, about 67 million at the time, with Kurdish languages making up most of the remainder.

Azerbaijani is the official language of Azerbaijan and is mutually intelligible with Turkish. Speakers of the two languages can usually understand each other, particularly in everyday conversations. Turkey and Azerbaijan have very good relations, and many Turkish companies and government agencies invest in Azerbaijan. Consequently, Turkey exerts significant influence over Azerbaijan. However, the growing presence of Turkish in Azerbaijan, coupled with the tendency of many children to use Turkish words instead of Azerbaijani ones due to satellite TV, has raised concerns that the unique characteristics of Azerbaijani may be eroded. Many bookstores sell Turkish books alongside Azerbaijani ones. Agalar Mahmadov, a leading intellectual, has expressed concern that Turkish has "already started to take over the national and natural dialects of Azerbaijan." Nevertheless, Turkish is not as prevalent as Russian as a foreign language.

Official status