Turkish language

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Turkish 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.

Classification

Turkish 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 distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 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 and is one of the official languages of Cyprus.

Dialects

Dialects 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 the Trabzon area (pontos being Black Sea in Greek). A modern version of Aramaic is also spoken in some villages in central and southern Turkey, and an Arabic dialect is spoken southwest of the Van sea. From the South Caucasian language groups, the Laz and Georgian languages are widely used in northeast Turkey, as is Cherkess in many villages which are geographically rather spread out. To this one can add about 40,000 villages in Turkey where Kurdish is spoken. In addition, several other Turkic languages are spoken by small groups. A small Jewish minority in Istanbul speaks "Ladino", also called "Judeo-Spanish", from descendants of Jews who fled from 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 "frozen" remnants of Kretic and old Spanish dialects from Turkey, making the country extremely interesting for language researchers and social anthropologists.

Sounds

One 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).

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 similar to Japanese and Latin, but unlike English.

Writing system

Turkish 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

• All free Turkish dictionaries
• Ethnologue report for Turkish
• onlineturkish.com
• Free online Turkish course written in German
• Online Turkish-English/English-Turkish dictionary
• Turkish - English Dictionary
• Omniglot: Turkish
• A comprehensive and accurate Turkish-(English/French/Italian/and various other languages) dictionary
• Texas Tech University, Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative

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