Turkish language

Lore & Background

During the Early Middle Ages, Turkic-speaking peoples spread across Central Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks brought Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish—into Anatolia in the 11th century. Also in the 11th century, Mahmud al-Kashgari published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary, the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk. Ottoman Turkish, the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire (c.

Reader's Guide

Turkish is significant as the most widely spoken Turkic language and a key link to the historical Ottoman Empire and earlier Turkic states. Its modern form emerged from a deliberate language reform in the early Republic of Turkey, which replaced the Perso-Arabic script with a Latin alphabet and purged many Arabic and Persian loanwords. This reform created a generational vocabulary gap: older speakers use older loanwords, while younger speakers favor new Turkish coinages. Turkish grammar is highly regular and agglutinative, with vowel harmony and no grammatical gender. The language's word accent system is described as either stress- or pitch-based, with most native words accented on the last syllable. Over 80% of Turkish vocabulary stems from native Turkic, with contributions from Arabic, French, Persian, Italian, Greek, and English. The language uses honorifics and a strong T–V distinction. Turkish is mutually intelligible with Azerbaijani and belongs to the Oghuz group of the Turkic family. The Altaic theory, which once grouped Turkic with Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic, has fallen out of favor since the 1960s; most linguists now consider Turkic languages unrelated to any other family.

Did You Know?

• Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world, with around 90 million speakers.
• Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender.
• The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the Orkhon inscriptions in modern Mongolia, dating to the Second Turkic Khaganate.