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Turkish is a Turkic language, spoken natively by about 72 million speakers in Turkey, Cyprus, and worldwide. The Turkish name for the language is Türkçe.
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Southern Turkic languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family (which is considered part of the even more disputed Ural-Altaic language family.)
Geographic distribution
Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. The Turkish used in countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the Republic of Macedonia, Romania and Uzbekistan is also called Osmanli.
Official status
Turkish is the official language of Turkey and is one of the official languages of Cyprus.
Dialects
Dialects of Turkish include Danubian, Eskişehir (spoken in Eskişehir Province), Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanli (spoken in Karaman Province), Edirne (spoken in Edirne), Gaziantep (spoken in Gaziantep Province), Urfa (spoken in Şanlıurfa Province).
Many other languages are spoken in Turkey, including: Pontic Greek in the Trabzon area (pontos being Black Sea in Greek). A modern version of Aramaic is also spoken in some villages in central and southern Turkey, and an Arabic dialect is spoken southwest of the Van sea. From the South Caucasian language groups, the Laz and Georgian languages are widely used in northeast Turkey, as is Cherkess in many villages which are geographically rather spread out. To this one can add about 40,000 villages in Turkey where Kurdish is spoken. In addition, several other Turkic languages are spoken by small groups. A small Jewish minority in Istanbul speaks "Ladino", also called "Judeo-Spanish", from descendants of Jews who fled from Spain in 1492 and found refuge in the Istanbul area. Professor Einar Haugen (1906-1994) of Norway who studied "ekte gulbrandsdalmal" - a dialect spoken in the Gulbrandsdalen district of Norway - among Norwegian immigrants in Iowa, found "frozen" remnants of Kretic and old Spanish dialects from Turkey, making the country extremely interesting for language researchers and social anthropologists.
Sounds
One of the characteristic features of Turkish is the vowel harmony (if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel; e.g. Erdem). See also the Ğ (soft g).
Vocalic system
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| Front
| Back
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| Close
| Unrounded
| i
| ı
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| Rounded
| ü
| u
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| Open
| Unrounded
| e
| a
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| Rounded
| ö
| o
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Grammar
Turkish, like Finnish and Hungarian, is an agglutinative language. It is known for having an abundance of suffixes and very few prefixes. Word order in Turkish is Subject Object Verb similar to Japanese and Latin, but unlike English.
Writing system
Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Kemal Atatürk as part of his efforts to modernize Turkey. Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see Ottoman Turkish), but use of the Arabic alphabet was outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced. See Turkish alphabet.
Examples
| English | Turkish
| | yes | evet
| | no | hayır
| | hello | merhaba
| | thanks | teşekkür ederim
| | please | lütfen
| | excuse me | affedersiniz
| | you're welcome | bir şey değil
| | good night | iyi geceler
| | good-bye | hoşça kalın
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A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: "Yurtta sulh, Cihanda sulh." -Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which is translated as "peace at home, peace in the world."
External links
Wikipedia articles written in this language are located at the
Turkish language Wikipedia
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