Turkish language

Turkish
Turkish
Türkçe
Native to	Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Greece, Iraq, Syria, Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan), Germany
Region	Turkey, Cyprus, Balkans, Caucasus
Native speakers	~65 million native, ~75 million total ~10 million as a second language
Language family	Altaic (Altaic language)(disputed) Turkic Southern Turkic or Oghuz Turkish group Turkish; ; ; ;
Writing system	Latin alphabet (Turkish variant) since 1928
Official status
Official language in	Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, Kosovo, Republic of Macedonia1; 1 In municipalities inhabited by a set minimum percentage of speakers
Regulated by	Turkish Language Association
Language codes
ISO 639-1	tr
ISO 639-2	tur (ota for Ottoman Turkish)
ISO 639-3	Either:; tur – Turkish; ota – Ottoman Turkish
	; Map of Turkish speaking populations in the countries of the world; Click on the image for the legend

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively by the Turkish people in Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, Republic of Macedonia and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as by several million emigrants in the European Union. The exact number of native speakers in Turkey is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data.

There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, Turkmen, and Qashqai. If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Gagauz and Khorasani Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which some linguists believe to be a part of the Altaic language family.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. In particular, Turkish is used in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia (specifically in Kosovo and Metohija), the Republic of Macedonia, Syria, Greece (especially in Western Thrace) and Israel (by Turkish Jews). More than two million Turkish speaking people live in Germany, and significant Turkish speaking communities in Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Turkish is spoken by almost all of Turkey's residents, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder (about 3,950,000 as estimated in 1980 [2]). However, the vast majority of the linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language to levels of native fluency.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. It also has official (but not primary) status in several municipalities of Republic of Macedonia, depending on the concentration of Turkish-speaking local population.

In Turkey, the regulatory body for Turkish is the Turkish Language Association (Turkish: Türk Dil Kurumu - TDK), which was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1932 under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for Research on the Turkish Language"). The Turkish Language Association was influenced by the linguistic purism ideology and one of its primary acts was the replacement of loan words and grammatical constructs of Arabic and Persian origin in the language with their Turkish equivalents, which, together with the adoption of the new Turkish alphabet in 1928, shaped the modern Turkish language as it is in use today (see the section on language reform, further below). TDK became an independent body in 1951, with the lifting of the requirement that it should be presided over by the Minister of Education. This status continued until August, 1983, when it was again tied to the government following the military coup of 1980.

Dialects

As a result of the original nationalist idea of establishing the İstanbul dialect of Turkish as the standard, dialectology remains as a highly immature discipline in Turkey. The standard language of Turkish is essentially the Ottoman Turkish language as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added. The preferred colloquial form is named İstanbul Türkçesi as manifested in the works of prominent pan-Turkists like Ziya Gökalp (Güzel dil, Türkçe bize / Başka dil, gece bize. / İstanbul konuşması / En saf, en ince bize.) and İsmail Gaspıralı. Academically, Turkish dialects are often referred to as ağız or şive, leading to ambiguity with the linguistic concept of accent. Turkish still lacks a comprehensive atlas of dialects and assimilation into official Turkish is influential.

The main dialects of Turkish include:

Rumelice (spoken by muhajirs from Rumelia) includes peculiar dialects of Dinler and Adakale,
Kıbrıs (spoken in Cyprus),
Edirne (spoken in Edirne),
Doğu (spoken in Eastern Turkey) has dialect continuum with Azerbaijani in some areas,
Karadeniz (spoken in the Eastern Black Sea region) is represented primarily by Trabzon dialect,
Ege (spoken in the Aegean region) has extension to Antalya,
Güneydoğu (spoken in the South, to the east of Mersin),
Orta Anadolu (spoken in the Middle Anatolian region),
Kastamonu (spoken in Kastamonu and vicinity),
Karamanlıca (spoken in Greece, where it is also named Kαραμανλήδικα) is the literary standard for Karamanlides.

Sounds

This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony, meaning that a word will have either front or back vowels, but not both. For example, in vişne "sour cherry" i is closed unround front and e is open unround front. Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix combinations, and words like masa ['masa]. Also, in the use of proper names, the stress is transferred to the syllable before the last (e.g. Istánbul), although there are exceptions to this (e.g. Ánkara).

Consonants

Consonant phonemes of Standard Turkish
	Bilabial		Labio- dental		Dental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Plosives	p	b			t	d					c	ɟ	k	g
Nasals	m				n
Fricatives			f	v	s	z			ʃ	ʒ				ɣ	h
Affricates							ʧ	ʤ
Tap							ɾ
Approximant											j
Lateral approximants					ɫ				l

The phoneme /ɣ/ usually referred to as "soft g"(yumuşak g), "ğ" in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. It never occurs at the beginning of a word, but always follows a vowel. When word-final or preceding another consonant, it lengthens the preceding vowel.

Vowels

IPA chart for Turkish monophthongs

The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü. There are no diphthongs in Turkish and when two vowels come together, which occurs rarely and only with loanwords, each vowel retains its individual sound.

**Turkish Vowels with Example Words**
IPA	Description	IPA	Orthography	English translation
Vowel sound		Example
monophthongs
i	Close front unrounded vowel	dil	dil	'tongue', 'language'
y	Close front rounded vowel	ɟy'neʃ	güneş	'sun'
ɯ	Close back unrounded vowel	ɯˈɫɯk	ılık	'mild'
e	Close-mid front unrounded vowel	je̞l	yel	'wind'
œ	Open-mid front rounded vowel	ɟœɾ	gör	'to see'
a	Open front unrounded vowel	dal	dal	'branch'
o	Close-mid back rounded vowel	jol	yol	'way'
u	Close back rounded vowel	utʃak	uçak	'airplane'

Writing system

Turkish is written using the Turkish alphabet, a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as an important step in the cultural reforms of the period, replacing the Ottoman Turkish alphabet previously in use. The work of preparing the the new alphabet and selecting the necessary modifications to account for sounds specific to Turkish language, was appointed to the Dil Encümeni (Language Commission) including Falih Rıfkı Atay, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın, Ahmet Cevat Emre, Ragıp Hulûsi Özdem, Fazıl Ahmet Aykaç, Mehmet Emin Erişirgil and İhsan Sungu. The introduction of the new Turkish alphabet was supported by Public Education Centers opened throughout the country, cooperation with publishing companies, and encouragement by Atatürk himself in trips to the countryside teaching the new letters to the public.

The sounds of the individual letters exhibit few surprises for English speakers. Following International Phonetic Alphabet conventions on phonetic transcription, angle brackets < > here are used to enclose written letters, and brackets [ ] are used to enclose symbols that represent the sounds. Most writing-sound correspondences can be predicted by English speakers, with the following exceptions. The <c> is pronounced [dʒ], like <j> in jail. The <ç> is pronounced [tʃ] like the <ch> in church. The <j> represents [ʒ] and is pronounced like the <s> in pleasure. The <ş> represents [ʃ] and is pronounced like <sh> in sheet. The <ı> represents [ɨ], a sound which does not exist in most varieties of English. It is pronounced somewhat like the <o> in baton or the <e> in munificent but with the mouth more closed and raised in the center. The <ğ> is pronounced like a soft, voiced version of the guttural Scottish <ch> or merely manifested by lengthening the precedent vowel and assimilating any subsequent vowel (e.g., soğuk is pronounced [souk], rather like soak in English)--except for the two highly irregularly spelled verbs döğmek and öğmek, where <ğ> is pronounced [v].

The effect of Kemal's introduction of an adapted Roman alphabet was a dramatic increase in literacy from Third World levels to nearly one hundred percent. It is critical to note that, for the first time, Turkish had an alphabet that was actually suited to the sounds of the language; the Arabic alphabet, which was hitherto in use, commonly shows only three different values for vowels (the consonants waw and yud, atop which the long 'u' and 'i' sounds, respectively, are occasionally multiplexed, and the alif, which can carry long medial 'a' or any initial vowel) but also lacked several vital consonants. The lack of discrimination among vowels is serviceable in Arabic (which sports few vowel sounds to begin with) but intolerable in Turkish, which features eight fundamental vowel sounds and a host of diphthongs based thereupon.

Grammar

Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no native prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", sıcak="hot", sımsıcak="very hot"). One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.) "Vowel harmony" is the principle by which a native Turkish word generally incorporates either exclusively back vowels (a, ı, o, u) or exclusively front vowels (e, i, ö, ü). A notation such as -den means either -dan or -den, whichever promotes vowel harmony; a notation such as -iniz means either -ınız, -iniz, -unuz, or -ünüz, again with vowel harmony constituting the deciding factor.

Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences:

Turkish	English
ev	house
evler	the houses
evin	your house
eviniz	your house (plural or respect)
evim	my house
evimde	at my house
evinde	at your house
evinizde	at your house (plural or respect)
evimizde	at our house
Evindeyim	I am at your house
Evinizdeyim	I am at your house (plural or respect)
Evindeyiz	We are at your house
Evinizdeyiz	We are at your house (plural or respect)
Evimizdeyiz	We are at our house

Turkish	English
üzüm	grape
üzümüm	my grape
üzümün	your grape
üzümümüz	our grape
üzümünüz	your grape", (plural or respect)
üzümümüzü	of our grape

Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined). Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify.

Possession is expressed by means of constructions based on verbs meaning "to exist" and "to not exist". Thus, while "var" and "yok" represent "exists" and "not exists," "vardı" and "yoktu" are the preterite of these, while "olacak" and "olmayacak" are the future. These lead to the most bizarre-looking (to a Western reader) sentential structures: e.g., in order to say, "My cat had no shoes," we form:

kedi + -m + -in ayak + kab(ı) + -lar + -ı yok + -tu
(kedimin ayakkabıları yoktu)

which literally translates as, "cat-mine-of foot-cover(of)-plural-his non-existent-was."

Turkish verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.

gel-                                                           "(to) come",
gelme-                                                     "not (to) come",
geleme-                                         "not (to) be able to come",
gelebil-                                            "(to) be able to come",
Gelememiş                     "She [or he] was apparently unable to come."
Gelememişti                               "She had not been able to come."
Gelememiştiniz                       "You (pl) had not been able to come."
Gelememiş miydiniz?                 "Have you (pl) not been able to come?"

All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms:

Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di

(The shortened form is called an enclitic.) Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English. This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive:

Türkiye'de modayı gazete sayfalarına taşıyan,
gazetemiz yazarlarından N. S. yaşamını yitirdi:

Türkiye'de    "in Turkey"        (locative) 
modayı        "fashion"          (accusative of moda)
gazete        "newspaper"        (nominative) 
sayfalarına   "to its pages"     (dative; sayfa "page", 
                                          sayfalar "pages",
                                          sayfaları "its pages")
taşıyan,      "carrying"         (present participle of taşı-)
gazetemiz     "our newspaper"    (nominative)gazete "newspaper"
yazarlarından "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer")
N. S.         [person's name]    (nominative)
yaşamını      "her life"         (accusative; yaşam "life")
yitirdi.      "lost"             (past tense of yitir- "lose" 
                                     from yit- "be lost")

"One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S., 
 who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

Vocabulary

Turkish extensively utilizes its agglutinative nature to form new words from former nouns and verbal roots. The majority of the Turkish words originate from the application of derivative suffixes to a relatively small set of core vocabulary.

An example with a substantive root:

göz         "eye",
gözlük      "eyeglasses"
gözlükçü    "someone who sells eyeglasses"
gözlükçülük "the business of selling eyeglasses"

Another example starting from a verbal root:

yat-      "to lie down"
yatır-    "to lay down [that is, to cause to lie down]"
yatırım   "instance of laying down: deposit, investment"
yatırımcı "depositor, investor"

Language reform

After the adoption of Islam by the Turks as their religion, Turkish language acquired a rather large collection of loan words from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, in particular Ottoman Divan poetry was heavily influenced by Persian forms, including the adoption of Persian poetic meters and ultimately the bringing of Persian words into the language in great numbers. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, the literary and official language of the empire was a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic, which differed considerably from everyday spoken Turkish of the time, and is now given the name Ottoman Turkish.

After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish Language Association (Turkish: Türk Dil Kurumu - TDK) was established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923 with the aim of conducting research on Turkish language. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to replace loan words of Arabic and Persian origin in the language with Turkish equivalents. The language reform was a part of the ongoing cultural reforms of the time (which were in turn a part in the broader framework of Atatürk's Reforms) and also included the abolishment of Arabic script in lieu of the new Turkish alphabet derived from the Latin alphabet (see the writing system section, above) which greatly helped increasing the literacy rate of the population. By banning the usage of replaced loan words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK were new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries.

Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with a different vocabulary due to this sudden change in the language. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words, the younger generations favor using new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents. There is also a political significance to the old versus new debate in the Turkish language. Sectors of the population that are more religious also tend to use older words in the press or daily language. Therefore, the use of the Turkish language is also indicative of adoption/resistance to Atatürk's reforms which took place more than 70 years ago. The last few decades saw the continuing work of the Turkish Language Association to coin new Turkish words to account for new concepts / technologies as they enter the language as loan words (mostly from English), but the association is occasionally criticized for coining words that obviously seem and sound as "invented".

However, many of the words derived by TDK, live together with their old counterparts. The different words –one originated from Old Turkic or derived by TDK; one originated from Arabic or Persian; and sometimes one originated from one of the European languages, especially French- having exactly the same literal meaning are used to express slightly different meanings, especially when speaking about abstract subjects. This is quite like the usage of Germanic words and the words originated from Romance languages in English.

Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are:

Old word	New Turkish word	English meaning	Remarks
müselles	üçgen	triangle	derived from the noun üç, which means "three"
tayyare	uçak	airplane	derived from the verb uçmak, which means "to fly"
nispet	oran	ratio	the old word is still used in the language today together with the new one
şimal	kuzey	north	derived from the Old Turkic noun kuz, which means “cold and dark place”
Teşrini-evvel	Ekim	October	the noun ekim means “the action of planting”, referring to the planting of cereal seeds in autumn, which is widespread in Turkey

Please see List of replaced loan words in Turkish for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

The language in daily life

Turkish has many formulaic expressions for various social situations. Several of them feature Arabic verbal nouns together with the Turkish verb et- ("make, do").

	literal translation	meaning (if different)
Merhaba	Welcome	Hello
Alo	Hello (from French "allô")	(on the telephone: Hello or Are you still there?)
Efendim	My lord	1. Hello (answering the telephone); 2. Sir/Madam (a polite way to address any person, male or female, married or single); 3. Excuse me, could you say that again?
Günaydın	[The] day [is] bright	Good morning
İyi günler	Good days	Good day
İyi akşamlar	Good evenings	Good evening
İyi geceler	Good nights	Good night
Evet	Yes
Hayır	No
Belki	Maybe
Hoş geldiniz	You came well / pleasantly	Welcome
Hoş bulduk	We found [it] well	We are (or I am) glad to be here
Nasılsın?	How are you (sing.)?	How are you? (familiar)
Nasılsınız?	How are you (pl.)?	How are you? (respectful, or plural)
İyiyim; siz nasılsınız?	I'm fine; how are you?
Ben de iyiyim	I too am fine	I am fine too
Affedersiniz	You make [a] forgiving	Excuse me
Lütfen	Of favour	Please
Teşekkür ederim; Sağolun	I make [a] thanking; Be alive	Thank you
Bir şey değil	It is nothing	You're welcome
Rica ederim	I make [a] request	Don't mention it; You're welcome; Don't say such bad things of yourself; Don't say such good things of me
Estağfurullah	I seek God's forgiveness (common Muslim prayer)	(similar to rica ederim)
Geçmiş olsun	May [it] be passed	Get well soon (said to somebody in any kind of difficulty, not just sickness; or to somebody who has just come through difficulty)
Başınız sağ olsun	May your head be healthy	My Condolences (said to somebody in mourning)
Elinize sağlık	Health to your hand	(said to praise the person that made this delicious food or other good thing)
Afiyet olsun	May [it] be healthy	bon appétit (good appetite)
Kolay gelsin	May [it] come easy	(said to somebody working)
Güle güle kullanın	Use [it] smiling	(said to somebody with a new possession)
Sıhhatler olsun	May [it] be healthy	(said to somebody who has bathed or had a shave or haircut)
Hoşçakal(ın)	Stay nice	"So long" or "Cheerio" (said to the person staying behind)
Güle güle	[Go] smiling	Good bye (said to somebody departing)
Allah'a ısmarladık	We commended [you] to God	Good bye [said to the person staying behind(for a long time)] or Adieu in French

A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:

Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh "Peace at home, peace in the world."

In the current language, this is

Yurtta barış, dünyada barış.

Notes

^ "[1] Ethnologue"
^ "Language" article from Encarta

[Ethnologue]

References

Geoffrey Lewis (2001). Turkish Grammar. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-870036-9.
İsmet Zeki Eyuboğlu (1991). Türk Dilinin Etimoloji Sözlüğü [Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language]. Sosyal Yayınları, İstanbul. ISBN 975-7384-72-2.
Sevgi Özel, Haldun Özel, and Ali Püsküllüoğlu, eds. (1986). Atatürk'ün Türk Dil Kurumu ve Sonrası [Ataturk's Turkish Language Society and After]. Bilgi Yayınevi, Ankara. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Ali Püsküllüoğlu (2004). Arkadaş Türkçe Sözlük [Arkadaş Turkish Dictionary]. Arkadaş Yayınevi, Ankara. ISBN 975-509-053-3.
Geoffrey Lewis (2002). The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-925669-1.

External links

[1] "[1] Ethnologue"

[2] "Language" article from Encarta

[1]

[2]