Turkish languageTurkish is a Turkic language, spoken by about 70 million speakers in Turkey and over 85 million speakers world-wide. The Turkish name for the language is Türkçe.
ClassificationTurkish 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 linguistics believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family. Geographic distributionTurkish 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 statusTurkish is the official language of Turkey and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. DialectsDialects 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 Trabzon area (pontos for Black Sea in greek). A modern version of arameic dialect is also spoken in some villages in central and southern Turkey and an arabic dialect is South West of Van sea. Under the South Caucasian language groups, the lasisk and georgian dialects are widely used in North East Turkey and tsjerkesian in many and geographically spread villages. To this can be added 40.000 villages around Turkey kurdish is spoken.Not to forget aserbajanian, kasak, turkmen and usbekian dialects. A small jewish minority in Istanbul speaks "ladino"also called "jewish-spanish" from descendants of jews thrown out of 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 the "frozen" remnants kretic and old spanish dialects from Turkey that makes this country a laboratory for language researchers and social anthropologists.
SoundsOne 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).
GrammarTurkish, 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 systemTurkish 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
External links
da:Tyrkisk sprog de:Türkische Sprache et:Türgi keel es:Turco eo:Turka lingvo fr:Turc nl:Turks ja:トルコ語 pl:Język turecki sv:Turkiska tt:Törek tele tr:Türkçe zh:土耳其语
Categories: Languages of Cyprus | Languages of Turkey | Turkic languages |
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