Turkish
Turkish belongs to the Turkish branch of the Altaic language family. While
the name "Turkish" usually refers to the official language of Turkey,
other Turkic languages exist, all of which are closely related, and, for the
most part, mutually intelligible. These include Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz,
Tatar, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek and others. It is common practice, in fact, to
refer to all these languages as "Turkish", and differentiate them
with reference to the geographical area, for example, "the Turkish language
of Azerbaijan".
About 56 million people speak Turkish, most of whom live in Turkey. It is also
spoken as the first language of many people living in areas once part of the
Ottoman Empire. Over a million speakers are found in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and
Greece and about 37,000 Turkish speakers live in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan. In Cyprus, Turkish is a co-official language (with
Greek) and is spoken as a first language by 19 percent of the population
Turkish has been spoken in the area of present day Turkey since the thirteenth
century. The establishment of the modern Turkish state in the 1920s involved
considerable language reform. Spoken Turkish was declared the language of the
country; measures were taken to expunge Persian and Arabic borrowings, and the
Arabic alphabet was replaced with the Roman alphabet currently in use. These
and other vocabulary reforms and standardization measures undertaken since the
1920s have been quite successful: Current standard Turkish is indeed standard
and consists of mostly Turkic vocabulary.
Source:
UCLA Language Materials Project
Information on writing system:
Independent Study Courses Available at UCSD:
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