Turkish language

Turkish language, member of the Turkic subdivision of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). Turkish is the official language of Turkey and one of the official languages of Cyprus. It is spoken by about 55 million people in Turkey and another million in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and Macedonia. The speech of educated people in İstanbul is the standard form of the language. Like the other Uralic and Altaic languages, Turkish is characterized by vowel harmony and agglutination. Thus suffixes added to the stem of the verb may indicate passive, reflexive, causative, and other meanings. Postpositions are used instead of prepositions. Both the definite article and grammatical gender are lacking. Turkish was written in the Arabic script following the conversion of the Turks to Islam, but in 1928 the Turkish president, Kemal Atatürk, ordered a change to a modified version of the Roman alphabet. The reform was designed to introduce an alphabet better suited to Turkish than the Arabic script and also to lessen the hold of Islam on Turkey. In the 1930s the Turks attempted to purify their language by eliminating words of foreign, especially Persian and Arabic, origin and to simplify the literary style of the language, making it more similar to colloquial Turkish.

Bibliography

See U. Heyd, Language Reform in Modern Turkey (1954); G. L. Lewis, Turkish Grammar (1967); H. I. Sebüktekin, Turkish-English Contrastive Analysis (1971); E. E. Erguvanli, The Function of Word Order in Turkish Grammar (1984).

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Turkish language

Turkic language of Turkey, spoken by about 90% of its population. Turkish has about 59 million speakers, with many enclaves in the Balkans and Cyprus (dating from Ottoman times) and in western Europe. Turkish was introduced into Anatolia with the invasion of Turkmen tribes in the 13th–14th centuries. Anatolian Turkish, written in the Arabic alphabet, is first attested in the 13th century. Ottoman Turkish was so heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic that it lost some of its Turkic characteristics and was incomprehensible to lower social strata. Efforts to re-Turkicize the language began in the 18th century but did not make serious gains until the 20th century and the founding of the Turkish republic. Much Perso-Arabic vocabulary was removed, and the Latin alphabet was adopted with the addition of diacritics to symbolize sounds peculiar to Turkish.