Language Diversity - Language Diversity - Map of Minorities & Regional and Minority Languages of Europe for and about linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe.

Language

Turkish (Türkçe)

Description

Turkish belongs to the Southern Turkic languages, which are part of the branch of the Turkic languages in the Altaic language family. Turkish is the most widely spoken Turkic language and an official language in Turkey and also in the Republic of Cyprus, next to Greek. Furthermore it is spoken as a local official language in Macedonia, Romania and in Kosovo. There are around 2 million speakers in Germany.

The Turkish language area has 10 dialect zones, and the Istanbul dialect is of particular importance. Its phonetics are the basis for the modern Turkish language standard.

No other language in the world has been written in so many different alphabets as Turkish. After the alphabets of Old Turkish the language was written in Anatolia in varieties of the Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Latin and Syrian alphabet. After a radical reform of the language and its alphabet, Turkish has been written in the Latin alphabet since 1928.

Important Words

Hello - merhaba

Thank you - teşekkürler

Cheers - Şerefe

You are not alone  - YALNIZ DEĞİLSİN

Special

Turkish is an agglutinative language, which means that units with grammatic meaning are joined as affixes to a specific word, without changing the root of the word.

Turkish, just like other Turkic languages, retained its vowel harmony, a historical linguistic form from the Altaic language family. Light vowels (e,i) can only exist in a word together with other light vowels, and heavy vowels (a, o, u) only with other heavy vowels.

Language families

  1. Altaic
  2. Turkic
  3. Southern Turkic
  4. Turkish

Countries (Official language)

Turkey (55.483.000 Speaker)