Turkish language

Turkish (called *Türkçe* or *Türkiye Türkçesi* by its speakers) is the leading member of the Turkic language family, spoken by roughly 90 million people. It serves as the official national language of Turkey and is one of two official languages in Cyprus. Communities of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other European countries, the South Caucasus, parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Globally, it ranks as the 18th most spoken language.

The language’s grammar relies heavily on agglutination—building words by adding suffixes—and is notably regular. Sentences typically follow a subject–object–verb order. Turkish lacks noun classes and grammatical gender. It also features evidentiality (marking how the speaker knows something), converbs, and a rich system of tenses, aspects, and moods.

Sound patterns in Turkish are governed by vowel harmony: native words usually contain only front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) or back vowels (a, ı, o, u), a trait called palatal harmony. Some suffixes also show a four-way harmony that includes rounding among high vowels. Most suffixes obey this rule, though there are exceptions, and loanwords are not bound by it. Word accent is described as either stress- or pitch-based; most native words fall on the last syllable, but suffixes can shift this, and loanwords vary widely.

Over 80% of Turkish vocabulary comes from native Turkic roots. The rest includes loanwords from Arabic, French, and Persian from the Ottoman era, plus smaller contributions from Italian, Greek, and English. During the Turkish language reform, many Arabic loanwords were replaced with newly coined Turkish terms, driven by ideas of linguistic purism.

Turkish uses honorifics and a strong T–V distinction, where the choice of second-person pronoun and verb forms signals politeness, social distance, age, courtesy, or familiarity. The plural “you” and its verb forms can be used for a single person as a mark of respect.

**Classification**

Turkish belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic family. Its close relatives include Azerbaijani (spoken in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran), Gagauz (in Gagauzia), Qashqai (in southern Iran), and Turkmen (in Turkmenistan). The Turkic family was once grouped under the larger Altaic hypothesis, alongside Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, with some linguists proposing even broader connections. However, the Altaic theory lost favor after the 1960s, and most linguists now see Turkic as unrelated to any other family, though a small number still support it. The older 19th-century Ural-Altaic theory, which linked Turkish with Finnish, Hungarian, and Altaic languages, is considered even less plausible given Altaic’s rejection; it relied mainly on shared features like agglutination, vowel harmony, and the absence of grammatical gender.

**History**

The earliest known records of Old Turkic are the three Orkhon inscriptions in modern Mongolia, erected in honor of Prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan during the Second Turkic Khaganate (682–744 CE). Discovered and excavated by Russian archaeologists in the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, these monuments and stone slabs revealed the Old Turkic language written in the Old Turkic alphabet—sometimes called “Turkic runes” due to a superficial resemblance to Germanic runic scripts.

As Turkic peoples expanded during the Early Middle Ages (roughly the 6th to 11th centuries), their languages spread across Central Asia, from Siberia to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Oghuz Turks, particularly the Seljuqs, brought their language—Oghuz, the direct ancestor of modern Turkish—into Anatolia in the 11th century. Around the same time, Mahmud al-Kashgari, a linguist from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, compiled the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of Turkic speakers, titled *Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk*.

**Ottoman Turkish**

After the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks adopted Islam around 950—both groups seen as ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans—the administrative language of these states absorbed many loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Ottoman Turkish, the literary and official language of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), was heavily influenced by Persian, especially in Divan poetry, which borrowed Persian poetic meters and a large number of Persian words. This formal language differed greatly from the everyday Turkish spoken by less-educated, lower-class, and rural Ottomans, known as *kaba Türkçe* (“vulgar Turkish”). That vernacular contained more native vocabulary and later became the basis for modern Turkish. In 1928, as part of Atatürk’s early reforms in the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script used for Ottoman Turkish was replaced with a Latin-based alphabet.