Turkish language

Turkish
Turkish
Türkçe
Native to	Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Azerbaijan, Germany
Region	Turkey, Cyprus, Balkans, Caucasus
Native speakers	~60 million native, ~75 million total
Language family	Altaic Turkic Southern Turkic or Oghuz Turkish group Turkish; ; ; ;
Writing system	Latin alphabet (since 1928)
Official status
Official language in	Turkey, Cyprus, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (unrecognized state in Cyprus), Bulgaria (national language), Republic of Macedonia (municipal language)
Regulated by	Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Association)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	tr
ISO 639-2	tur (ota for Ottoman Turkish)
ISO 639-3	Either:; tur – Turkish; ota – Ottoman Turkish

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as by several million immigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 60 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of the Turkish population, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder. However, the majority of the linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual in Turkish.

There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, Turkmen, and Qashqai. If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Osmanli Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which most linguists believe to be member of an Altaic language family.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. In particular, Turkish is used in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia (specifically in Kosovo and Metohija), the Republic of Macedonia, and Greece. About two million Turkish speaking people live in Germany.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. In Turkey, the Turkish Language Foundation (Türk Dil Kurumu) was founded by Kemal Atatürk in 1932 as the Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for the Investigation of the Turkish Language"), an independent body. The Turkish Language Foundation was influenced with the ideology that the purity of the language had to be preserved by expunging words and grammatical constructions of Persian and Arabic (see below for more on replacing old words). In August, 1983, when Turkey was under martial law as a result of the military coup of 1980, the Turkish Language Society was brought under the control of the prime ministry.

Dialects

Dialects of Turkish include Istanbul Turkish (The formal "good" dialect, ĺstanbul Türkçesi), Rumelian (Rumelice), Kıprıslıca (spoken in Cyprus), Edirne (spoken in Edirne), Doġu (Eastern)

Sounds

One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony, meaning that the same word will have either front or back vowels, but not both. For example, in vişne "sour cherry" i is close unround front and e is open unround front. Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix combinations and words like masa ['masa].

Consonants

Consonants phonemes of Standard Turkish
	Bilabial		Labio- dental		Dental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Plosives	p	b			t	d					c	ɟ	k	g
Nasals	m				n
Fricatives			f	v	s	z			ʃ	ʒ				ɣ	h
Affricates							ʧ	ʤ
Tap							ɾ
Approximant											j
Lateral approximants					ɫ				l

The phoneme /ɣ/ usually refered to as "soft g"(yumuşak g), "ğ" in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. It can never be at the beginning of a word. When it is word-final or preceding another consonant it lengthens the preceding vowel. Because the Turkish alphabet lacks the "W" letter, "ğ" is used instead of it, especially in words borrowed from Arabic.

Vowels

Grammar

Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no native prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", sıcak="hot", sımsıcak="very hot"). One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see #Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.) Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences:

ev                         "house",
eviniz                "your house",
evinizde           "at your house",
Evinizdeyiz "We are at your house."

Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined). Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify.

Turkish verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.

gel-                                                           "(to) come",
gelme-                                                     "not (to) come",
geleme-                                         "not (to) be able to come",
gelebil-                                            "(to) be able to come",
Gelememiş                      "She [or he] was apparently unable to come."
Gelememişti                                "She had not been able to come."
Gelememiştiniz                         "You (pl) had not been able to come."
Gelememiş miydiniz?                           "Have you (pl) not been able to come?"

All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms:

Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di

Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English. This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive:

Türkiye'de modayı gazete sayfalarına taşıyan,
gazetemiz yazarlarından N. S. yaşamını yitirdi:

Türkiye'de    "in Turkey"        (locative) 
modayı        "fashion"          (accusative of moda)
gazete        "newspaper"        (nominative) 
sayfalarına   "to its pages"     (dative; sayfa "page", 
                                          sayfalar "pages",
                                          sayfaları "its pages")
taşıyan,      "carrying"         (present participle of taşı-)
gazetemiz     "our newspaper"    (nominative)gazete "newspaper"
yazarlarından "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer")
N. S.         [person's name]    (nominative)
yaşamını      "her life"         (accusative; yaşam "life")
yitirdi.      "lost"             (past tense of yitir- "lose" 
                                     from yit- "be lost")

"One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S., 
 who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

Vocabulary

Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns:

göz         "eye",
gözlük      "eyeglasses"
gözlükçü    "someone who sells glasses"
gözlükçülük "the business of selling glasses"

and from verbs:

yat-      "lie down"
yatır-    "lay down [that is, cause to lie down]"
yatırım   "instance of laying down: deposit, investment"
yatırımcı "depositor, investor".

Turkish vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in the history of the language. In the last sixty years, Turkish vocabulary has gone through changes that might take three centuries in another language.

Replaced old words

After the adoption of Islam as their religion some Arabic words (and a small number of Persian words) were widely used by the Turks. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, the official language used by the empire was a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Farsi.

After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), which had an ideologically driven task to "purify" the language by replacing words of Arabic and Persian origin. This was part of a bigger effort to abolish the Arabic script in lieu of the Latin alphabet as part of a Westernization process. By banning the usage of these words in the press, the foundation succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK are new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries.

Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with a different vocabulary due to this sudden change in the language. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words, the younger generations favor using new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents. There is also a political significance to the old versus new debate in the Turkish language. Sectors of the population that are more religious also tend to use older words in the press or daily language. Therefore, the use of the Turkish language is also indicative of adoption/resistance to Atatürk's reforms which took place more than 70 years ago. In the last 20 years the "Turkish Language Foundation coined such words that they obviously seem and sound as "invented". Some of them are said to derive from old Turkic words, which are actually non existant.

Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are:

Old word	New Turkish word	English meaning	Remarks
müselles	üçgen	triangle	derived from the noun üç, which means "three"
tayyare	uçak	airplane	derived from the verb uçmak, which means "to fly"
nispet	oran	ratio	the old word is still used in the language today together with the new one
şimal	kuzey	north
Teşrini-evvel	Ekim	October

Please see List of replaced loan words in Turkish for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

Writing system

Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Kemal Atatürk as part of his efforts to modernize Turkey. He ordered the new alphabet to an Armenian named Agop Dilaçar. The familiyname was given to him by Atatürk, which means "language opener". Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see Ottoman Turkish language), but use of the Arabic alphabet was outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced. See Turkish alphabet.

The language in daily life

Turkish has many formulaic expressions for various social situations. Several of them feature Arabic verbal nouns together with the Turkish verb et- ("make, do").

	literal translation	meaning (if different)
Merhaba	Welcome (Arabic)	Hello
Alo	Hello (from French "allô")	(on the telephone: Are you still there?)
Efendim	My lord	1. Hello (answering the telephone; 2. Sir/Madam (a polite way to address any person, male or female, married or single); 3. Excuse me, could you say that again?
Günaydın	[The] day [is] bright	Good morning
İyi günler	Good days	Good day
İyi akşamlar	Good evenings	Good evening
İyi geceler	Good nights	Good night
Evet	Yes
Hayır	No
Hoş geldiniz	You came well	Welcome
Hoş bulduk	We found [it] well	We are (or I am) glad to be here
Nasılsın?	How are you (sing.)?	How are you? (familiar)
Nasılsınız?	How are you (pl.)?	How are you? (respectful, or plural)
İyiyim; siz nasılsınız?	I'm fine; how are you?
Ben de iyiyim	I too am fine	I am fine too
Affedersiniz	You make [a] forgiving	Excuse me
Lütfen	Please
Teşekkür ederim	I make [a] thanking	Thank you
Bir şey değil	It is nothing	You're welcome
Rica ederim	I make [a] requesting	Don't mention it; You're welcome; Don't say such bad things of yourself; Don't say such good things of me
Estağfurullah	I seek God's forgiveness (common Muslim prayer)	(similar to rica ederim)
Geçmiş olsun	May [it] be passed	Get well soon (said to somebody in any kind of difficulty, not just sickness; or to somebody who has just come through difficulty)
Başınız sağ olsun	May your head be healthy	My Condolences (said to somebody in mourning)
Elinize sağlık	Health to your hand	(said to praise the person that made this delicious food or other good thing)
Afiyet olsun	May [it] be healthy	bon appétit (good appetite)
Kolay gelsin	May [it] come easy	(said to somebody working)
Güle güle kullanın	Use [it] smiling	(said to somebody with a new possession)
Sıhhatler olsun	May [it] be healthy	(said to somebody who has bathed or had a shave or haircut)
Güle güle	[Go] smiling	Fare well (said to somebody departing)
Allah'a ısmarladık	We commended [you] to God	Good bye (said to the person staying behind)

A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:

Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh "Peace at home, peace in the world."

In the current language, this is

Yurtta barış, dünyada barış.

References

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External links