Turkish language

Turkish is a major world language spoken by approximately 90 million people.

It serves as the national language of Turkey and is one of two official languages in Cyprus. Beyond these borders, significant Turkish-speaking communities live in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and North Macedonia. Smaller groups also exist in Greece, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Because of its large number of speakers, it ranks as the 18th-most spoken language globally. This widespread use connects diverse populations across many different countries and continents.

The structure of the Turkish language is defined by several unique linguistic features. One primary characteristic is vowel harmony, where vowels within a word follow specific patterns to sound consistent. Another key feature is extensive agglutination, a process where many suffixes are added to a root to build complex words. The basic sentence structure follows a subject–object–verb order. Unlike many other languages, Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. The language also relies heavily on honorifics to show respect. This includes a strong T–V distinction, which uses different pronouns and verb forms to signal politeness, age, or social distance.

Turkish belongs to the Oghuz group within the Turkic language family. This family includes other related languages like Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and northwest Iran, as well as Gagauz, Qashqai, and Turkmen. Historically, some linguists believed the Turkic family was part of a larger "Altaic" family that included Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. This was known as the Altaic theory. However, this theory has lost popularity since the 1960s. Most modern linguists now believe Turkic languages are unrelated to those other families. The previous "Ural-Altaic" theory, which linked Turkish to Finnish and Hungarian, is also considered unlikely today.

The history of written Turkic reaches back to the 7th and 8th centuries. The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia.

These monumental stones were erected to honor Prince Kul Tigin and Emperor Bilge Khagan during the Second Turkic Khaganate. Archaeologists discovered these runiform inscriptions, which look similar to Germanic runes, between 1889 and 1893. During the 11th century, the Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks brought the Oghuz language into Anatolia. This language is the direct ancestor of modern Turkish. During this same period, the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari published a comprehensive dictionary and map of Turkic speakers.

During the era of the Ottoman Empire, the language underwent significant changes. The administrative and literary variety was known as Ottoman Turkish. This version was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. It differed so much from everyday speech that it was largely unintelligible to most people. While the elite used this complex style, the rural and less-educated populations spoke "vulgar Turkish," which used more native vocabulary. This everyday speech eventually became the basis for the modern language. The influence of Persian was especially strong in Ottoman literature, particularly in Divan poetry, which adopted Persian poetic meters.

In the early years of the Republic of Turkey, major reforms transformed the language. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, the Perso-Arabic script was replaced with a Latin-based alphabet.

In 1932, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established under Atatürk's patronage. The TDK aimed to research the language and replace many Arabic and Persian loanwords with Turkish equivalents. They achieved this by banning certain imported words in the press and reviving Old Turkish terms. For example, the word for aeroplane was created by using the verb for "to fly."

These changes were so sudden that they created a vocabulary gap between older and younger generations.

Today, the TDK continues to work on coining new words for modern technology and concepts. While many new terms from English are accepted, some older words have taken on new roles. For instance, the word "kitap," which originally meant book, is still used, but the Old Turkic word for book is now used to mean "script" in computer science. Turkish also maintains a close relationship with Azerbaijani. The two languages are mutually intelligible, meaning speakers can understand each other during daily conversation.

This connection is so strong that Turkish media is widely watched in Azerbaijan, though some scholars worry about the impact on the Azerbaijani dialect.