Turkish

Türkçe

Turkic > Southwestern (Oghuz) > Western Oghuz

Spoken by: 51 million according to Ethnologue.com, 1987

Official in: Turkey, Cyprus

Spoken primarily in: Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus

The 1920s was a dynamic time: Turkey was created out of the remainders of the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Turkish was quickly and thoroughly transformed into modern Turkish. Whereas Ottoman Turkish was written with the Arabic script, a new modified version of the Latin alphabet was invented for modern Turkish. The vocabulary which heavily rested on Arabic and Persian loanwords was partly exchanged. When possible, Turkic words used by the uneducated classes would be raised to standard, but a special language committe also developed a big number of neologisms, mostly from older Turkic words, like uçak (airplane) from the verb uçmak (to fly). Turkish is an agglutinative language. Endings are ‘glued’ onto the root. A phrase like ‘in my houses’ will be translated with one word: evlerimde where ev means ‘house’, -ler is the plural ending, -im is the equivalent of ‘my’, and -de is the locative ending. Since Turkish uses vowel harmony, the vowels in these endings might change depending on the vowels in the root.