Turkish language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Turkish is a Turkic language, which serves as a national language for 70 million speakers in Turkey and over 80 million speakers world-wide. Turkish is also known as Tuerkisch or Anatolian. The Turkish name for the language is Tuerkce.
| Turkish (Tuerkce) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Turkey |
| Region: | - |
| Total speakers: | Over 80 Million |
| Ranking: | 19 |
| Genetic classification: | Altaic Turkic Southern Turkish Turkish |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Turkey |
| Regulated by: | - |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | tr |
| ISO 639-2 | tur, ota |
| SIL | TRK |
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorosani Turkish in addition to Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Southern Turkic languages, which is a member of the Altaic language family.
Geographic distribution
Turkish is spoken in Turkey and 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.
Dialects
Dialects of Turkish include Danubian, Eskisehir, Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanli, Edirne, Gaziantep, Urfa.
Sounds
One of the characteristic features of Turkish is 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),
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, which is different from English and most other Indo-European languages.
Writing system
Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. In 1928, Kemal Atatuerk, as a part of his efforts to modernize Turkey, illegalized the Arabic alphabet, replacing it with a modified version of the Latin alphabet. See Turkish alphabet.
External links