Turkish Türkçe
 |
"welcome" |
IntroductionTurkish, the westernmost of the Turkic languages, belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It is the largest of the Turkic languages in terms of number of speakers. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility Turkey occupies a central geographical meeting point between Asia and Europe. Anatolia, the western region of Asian Turkey, is one of the oldest inhabited areas of the world. It is thought that the first human inhabitants appeared in Anatolia as far back as 7,500 BC. Language and language reform are hot political issues in Turkey with an ongoing battle between supporters of a traditional lexicon and those who support a modern, turkified one with a large number of borrowings from western European languages. Religious publications have not been as deeply affected by language reform as secular literature. They continue to use a form of Turkish that relies on Arabic and Persian vocabulary and syntax. The resurgence of Islam in the 1990s has led to the reintroduction of many Islamic words into modern spoken Turkish. |
between Turkish and other 
The 
Turkish is the official language of Turkey, where it is spoken by 46.3 million people. It is also the official language of Cyprus along with Greek. The rest of the Turkish speakers live in 35 different countries in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Americas (
Most of these countries were part of the territory governed by the 
Dialects |
Modern standard Turkish is based on the Istanbul dialect. |
Turkish has a number of dialects. Among them are:
Structure
Sound System
|
Turkish has 28 phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Vowels
The sound system of Turkish is characterized by vowel harmony, a type of phonological process that involves constraints on which vowels may be found near each other. There are two kinds of vowels -- front vowels, which are produced at the front of the mouth, e.g., /i/, /e/, and back vowels, produced at the back of the mouth, e.g., /a/, /u/, /o/. Native Turkic words can contain only all front or all back vowels, and all suffixes must conform to the vowel of the syllable preceding them in the word. For example, a vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation of the rest of the vowels in that word, e.g., in Turkish, ev- 'house + -ler 'plural' is evler 'houses', çocuk- 'child' + -ler 'plural' is çocuklar 'children'. In the first example, all vowels in evler are front vowels. In the second example, all vowels in çocuklar are back vowels. Consonants
Stress
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
'book' (in the accusative case).
- 
Click here
|
Like all Turkic languages, Turkish is agglutinative, i.e., grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to stems. There are no prefixes. There is a one-to-one relationship between suffix and meaning, so suffixes are strung together one after another, resulting on occasion in very long words. There are various rules for their ordering. Turkish uses postpositions rather than prepositions to signal certain grammatical relationships. Noun phrase
Verb phrase
Click here for a Turkish verb conjugator. Word order |
Writing
|
Turkish is written using the Roman alphabet adapted to represent the sounds of Turkish. It was adopted in 1928 as part of Atatürk's effort to europeanize Turkey. Before that, Turkish was written with the Arabic script that was adopted in the 15th century. Prior to the 15th century, Turkish was written with the Uyghur script.
Click here for an online tutorial on the Turkish alphabet with sound. Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Turkish.
|
|
Turkish words in English
|
Resources |
Click here to find out where Turkish is taught in the United States. Online resources for studying Turkish |
 | How difficult is it to learn Turkish? Turkish is considered a Category II language in terms of difficulty for English speakers. . |
Copyright 2007 © National Virtual Translation Center