Turkish language
Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world.
To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with the Latin script-based Turkish alphabet.
Some distinctive characteristics of the Turkish language are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. The basic word order of Turkish is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. The language makes usage of honorifics and has a strong T–V distinction which distinguishes varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms can be used for referring to a single person out of respect.
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family. Other members include Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and north-west Iran, Gagauz of Gagauzia, Qashqai of south Iran, and Turkmen of Turkmenistan.Historically the Turkic family was seen as a branch of the larger Altaic family, including Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and Tungusic, with various other language families proposed for inclusion by linguists.
Altaic theory has fallen out of favour since the 1960s, and a majority of linguists now consider Turkic languages to be unrelated to any other language family, though the Altaic hypothesis still has a small degree of support from individual linguists. The nineteenth-century Ural-Altaic theory, which grouped Turkish with Finnish, Hungarian and Altaic languages, is considered even less plausible in light of Altaic's rejection. The theory was based mostly on the fact these languages share three features: agglutination, vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender.
History
The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the Second Turkic Khaganate. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Old Turkic alphabet, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages, peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia, covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia all the way to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language—into Anatolia during the 11th century. Also during the 11th century, an early linguist of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk.
Ottoman Turkish
Following the adoption of Islam around the year 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of Persian poetic meters and a great quantity of imported Persian words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period is termed Ottoman Turkish, which was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably from today's modern Turkish and was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as kaba Türkçe or 'vulgar Turkish', spoken by the less-educated, lower and also rural members of Ottoman society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as the basis for the modern Turkish language.While visiting the region between Adıyaman and Adana, Evliya Çelebi recorded the "Turkman language" and compared it with his own Turkish:
| Turkman language | Ottoman Turkish | Modern Turkish | English |
| yalvaç | peygamber | peygamber | prophet |
| fakı | imâm | imam | imam |
| yüce Çalap | Âli Allah | yüce Allah | mighty God |
| eyne | câmi | cami | mosque |
| mezgit | mescid | mescit | mosque |
| gümeç, lavâşa, pişi | ekmek | ekmek, lavaş, pişi | bread, lavash, boortsog |
| kekremsi | şarâb | şarap | wine |
| Kancarıdaydın? | Nerede idin? | Neredeydin? | Where were you? |
| Kancarı yılıgan be? | Nereye gidersin bire? | Nereye gidiyorsun? | Where are you going? |
| Muhıdı geyen mi? | Ferâce giyermisin? | Ferace giyer misin? | Will you wear ferace? |
| Bargım yavıncıdı. | Karnım ağrıdı. | Karnım ağrıdı. | My stomach hurt. |
| şarıkdı | şehirli oldu | şehirli oldu | He/She/It became urban. |
Language reform and modern Turkish
After the foundation of the modern state of Turkey and the [|script reform], the Turkish Language Association was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origins with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries. In 1935, the TDK published a bilingual Ottoman-Turkish/Pure Turkish dictionary that documents the results of the language reform.Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic and Persian origins, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used the formal style of Ottoman Turkish that had been common at the time amongst statesmen and the educated strata of society in the setting of formal speeches and documents. After the language reform, the Turkish education system discontinued the teaching of literary Ottoman Turkish, and over time the speaking and writing ability of society atrophied to the point that later generations of Turkish speakers would perceive the speech as sounding so alien that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.
The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as Turkic bölem to replace Arabic fırka, 'political party'—also failed to meet with popular approval. Some words restored from Old Turkic have taken on specialized meanings; for example betik is now used to mean 'script' in computer science while the Arabic loanword kitap remains for 'book' in Turkish.
Some examples of modern Turkish words and the old loanwords are:
| Ottoman Turkish | Modern Turkish | English translation | Ottoman etymology | Modern derivation |
| مثلث | üçgen | triangle | Arabic مثلث | Compound of the noun üç and the suffix -gen |
| طیاره | uçak | aeroplane | Arabic طير, 'birds, flying' | Derived from the verb uçmak. The word was first proposed to mean 'airport'. |
| نسبت | oran | ratio | Arabic نسبة | The old word is still used in the language today together with the new one. The modern word is from the Old Turkic verb or-. |
| شمال | kuzey | north | Persian شمال, 'north' | Derived from the Old Turkic noun kuz. The word is restored from Middle Turkic usage. |
| تشرینِ اول | ekim | October | Arabic تشرين الأول, 'autumn' + 'the first ' | The noun ekim means 'sowing', referring to the planting of cereal seeds in autumn, which is widespread in Turkey |
Geographic distribution
Turkish is natively spoken by the Turkish people in Turkey and by the Turkish diaspora in some 30 other countries. The Turkish language is mutually intelligible with Azerbaijani. In particular, Turkish-speaking minorities exist in countries that formerly belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Iraq, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, the Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. More than two million Turkish speakers live in Germany; and there are significant Turkish-speaking communities in the United States, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Due to the cultural assimilation of Turkish immigrants in host countries, not all ethnic members of the diaspora speak the language with native fluency.File:IKEABerlin.JPG|thumb|right|upright|An advertisement by the IKEA branch in Berlin written in the German and Turkish languages.
In 2005, 93% of the population of Turkey were native speakers of Turkish, about 67 million at the time, with Kurdish languages making up most of the remainder.
Azerbaijani language, official in Azerbaijan, is mutually intelligible with Turkish and speakers of both languages can understand them without noticeable difficulty, especially when discussion comes on ordinary, daily language. Turkey has very good relations with Azerbaijan, with a multitude of Turkish companies and authorities investing there, while the influence of Turkey in the country is very high. The rising presence of this very similar language in Azerbaijan and the fact that many children use Turkish words instead of Azerbaijani words due to satellite TV has caused concern that the distinctive features of the language will be eroded. Many bookstores sell books in Turkish language along Azerbaijani language ones, with Agalar Mahmadov, a leading intellectual, voicing his concern that Turkish language has "already started to take over the national and natural dialects of Azerbaijan". However, the presence of Turkish as foreign language is not as high as Russian. In Uzbekistan, the second most populated Turkic country, a new TV channel Foreign Languages TV was established in 2022. This channel has been broadcasting Turkish lessons along with English, French, German and Russian lessons.