The Turkish language reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Turkish language

Turkish is a Turkic language, which serves as a national language for 70 million speakers in Turkey and over 80 million speakers world-wide. Turkish is also known as Türkisch or Anatolian. The Turkish name for the language is Türkçe.

Turkish (Türkçe)
Spoken in: Turkey
Region: -
Total speakers: Over 80 Million
Ranking: 19
Genetic
classification:
Altaic
 Turkic
  Southern
   Turkish
    Turkish
Official status
Official language of: Turkey
Regulated by: -
Language codes
ISO 639-1 tr
ISO 639-2 tur, ota
SIL TRK

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorosani Turkish in addition to Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Southern Turkic languages, which is a member of the Altaic language family.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and 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.

Dialects

Dialects of Turkish include Danubian, Eskisehir, Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanli, Edirne, Gaziantep, Urfa.

Sounds

One of the characteristic features of Turkish is 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),

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, which is different from English and most other Indo-European languages.

Writing system

Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. In 1928, Kemal Atatürk, as a part of his efforts to modernize Turkey, illegalized the Arabic alphabet, replacing it with a modified version of the Latin alphabet. See Turkish alphabet.

External links