Turkish language

Turkish
Turkish
Türkçe
Pronunciation	[ˈt̪yɾkˌtʃe]
Native to	Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Syria, Turkey, Uzbekistan,; and by immigrant communities in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and other countries of the Turkish diaspora
Region	Anatolia, Cyprus, Balkans, Caucasus, Central Europe, Western Europe
Native speakers	over 77 million worldwide (date missing)
Language family	Altaic (controversial) Turkic Southwestern Turkic (Oghuz) Western Oghuz Turkish; ; ; ;
Writing system	Latin alphabet (Turkish variant)
Official status
Official language in	Turkey,; Cyprus,; Northern Cyprus
Recognised minority language in	Bosnia and Herzegovina; Greece; Iraq; Kosovo; North Macedonia; Romania
Regulated by	Turkish Language Association
Language codes
ISO 639-1	tr
ISO 639-2	tur
ISO 639-3	tur
	Countries where the Turkish language is official

Turkish (Türkçe) or Anatolian Turkic is a language officially spoken in Turkey and Northern Cyprus. The language is also spoken by several million ethnic Turkish immigrants in Europe.

A girl speaking Turkish

Turkish is a Turkic language. Turkish is most closely related to other Turkic languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Kazakh. Another theory is that it is one of the many Altaic languages, which also include Japanese, Mongolian, and Korean.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed it to the Latin alphabet from Arabic alphabet. The Turkish government justified the move as making Turkish much easier to learn to increase literacy. The literacy rate indeed increased greatly after the reform, from around 10.5% (in 1927)^[3] to over 90% (today). Some say that the move was also to distance the country from the Ottoman Empire, whose documents can no longer be read except by a few scholars.

The Latin alphabet was made to reflect the actual sounds of spoken Turkish, rather than simply transcribing the old Ottoman Arabic script into a new form. The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. It represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. It is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.

Simple phrases

Merhaba = Hello (formal)
Selam = Hello
Nasılsın? = How are you?
İyiyim = I'm fine
Teşekkür ederim = Thank you (formal)
Teşekkürler = Thanks
Sağ ol = Thank you
Benim adım ... = My name is ...
Türkçe bilmiyorum. = I don't speak Turkish.
İngilizce biliyor musunuz? = Do you speak English?
Tekrarlar mısınız? = Can you repeat?
Evet = Yes
Hayır = No
Belki = Maybe
Biraz = A little
Acıktım. = I'm hungry.
Dur! = Stop!
Yapma! = Don't do it!
İstemiyorum. = I don't want it.
Tabii = Sure
Bekledim. = I waited.

Turkish Language Media

The 9th-century Irk Bitig or "Book of Divination"
The 15th century Book of Dede Korkut
An advertisement by the IKEA branch in Berlin written in the German and Turkish languages.
Map of the main subgroups of Turkish dialects across Southeast Europe and the Middle East.
Vowels of Turkish. From Zimmer & Orgun (1999:155)
Road sign at the European end of the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. (Photo taken during the 28th Istanbul Marathon in 2006)
Atatürk introducing the new Turkish alphabet to the people of Kayseri. September 20, 1928. (Cover of the French L'Illustration magazine)
A Turkish computer keyboard with Q (QWERTY) layout