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Turkish Language

Writer's picture: UKLST UKLST

The Turkish language belongs to the Altay branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family, like Hungarian and Finnish. Turkish is a significant language because of the absolute number of people who speak it. 75 million people speak Turkish as their first language, making it one of the world’s 15 most widely spoken first languages.




15 million people speak Turkish as a second language and 93% of the population of turkey were native speakers of Turkish, and about 67 million people in good time, with Kurdish language making up most of the remainder.

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and it has official status in 38 municipalities in Kosovo and in Kirkuk governorate in Iraq.


Ottoman Turkish was highly influenced by Persian and Arabic words and the language accounted for up to 88 % of its vocabulary.

Across the span of history, Turks have spread over the vast geological area, taking their language with them as they have lived in a wide area from today’s Mongolia to the north coast of the Black Sea, Anatolia, Iraq, and northern Africa.

Because of the distance involved, innumerable dialects and accents have emerged.


The history of The Turkish language is split into three main groups, old Turkish was spoken 7th to 13th century, mid-Turkish was spoken 13th to 20th, and modern Turkish from the 20th century onwards.

During the Ottoman Empire period, Arabic and Persian words capture the Turkish language and it accordingly mixed with other languages.


The Ottoman Turkish is a descent from modern Turkish however the standard Turkish of today is essential as when in the Latin alphabet and with a plenitude of new words added, which means there are now far fewer loan words from other languages, and ottoman Turkish was not quickly modified into the today’s Turkish.


After the foundation of the Turkish republic in1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw the replacement of many Persian and Arabic origami in the language with their Turkish equivalents and also he saw the renewal of the Perso-Arabic script with the extended Latin alphabets.


As a result of this sudden change in language, adults and young ones in turkey begin to differ in their vocabulary. While the generation born before the 1940s tends to use their older terms of Persian and Arabic origin, however, the younger generation favors new expressions.


Well, modern Turkish is the successor of Ottoman Turkish and its antecedent, old Anatolian Turkish, which was introduced into Anatolia by Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century. Old Turkish gradually absorb multitudinous Persian and Arabic words and even phonological and morphological forms written in Arabic script.  


 
 
 

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