Turkish ( Türkçe )

Hoş geldinizi - Welcome

Turkish, the westernmost of the Turkic languages, belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It is the largest of the Turkic languages in terms of number of speakers. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Qashqai.

Turkey occupies a central geographical meeting point between Asia and Europe. Anatolia, the western region of Asian Turkey, is one of the oldest inhabited areas of the world. It is thought that the first human inhabitants appeared in Anatolia as far back as 7,500 BC. The Ottoman Empire, established by the Oghuz Turks of western Anatolia and ruled by the Osmanli dynasty, ruled the areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea from 1281 to 1922. It was defeated by the Allies during World War I, and its territories were colonized by the victors. After the Turkish War of Independence (1918-1923), the Republic of Turkey was founded from the remnants of the fallen empire by Mustafa Kemal, who was later given the name of Atatürk 'Father of the Turks'. He was responsible for a wide range of reforms that helped to modernize Turkey, including far-reaching language reforms that concentrated on replacing the Arabic script with the Roman one, and purging the language of Arabic and Persian words.

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, where it is spoken by 46.3 million people. It is also the official language of Cyprus along with Greek. The rest of the Turkish speakers live in 35 different countries in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Americas (Ethnologue). Most of these countries were part of the territory governed by the Ottoman Empire. The worldwide population of speakers of Turkish is estimated at around 51 million (Ethnologue).

Language and language reform are hot political issues in Turkey with an ongoing battle between supporters of a traditional lexicon and those who support a modern, turkified one with a large number of borrowings from western European languages. Religious publications have not been as deeply affected by language reform as secular literature. They continue to use a form of Turkish that relies on Arabic and Persian vocabulary and syntax. The resurgence of Islam in the 1990s has led to the reintroduction of many Islamic words into modern spoken Turkish.

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