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Turkish is a language spoken by 65–73 million people worldwide, predominantly in Turkey, with smaller communities of speakers in Cyprus, Greece and Eastern Europe, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe, particularly Germany, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages.
The roots of the language can be traced to Central Asia, with the first written records dating back nearly 1,200 years. To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the immediate precursor of today's Turkish—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the new Turkish Republic, the Ottoman script was replaced with a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet. Concurrently, the newly founded Turkish Language Association initiated a drive to reform the language by removing Persian and Arabic loanwords in favor of native variants and coinages from Turkic roots.
The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. The basic word order of Turkish is Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect. Turkish also has no noun classes or grammatical gender.
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Turkish, or Western, subgroup of the Oghuz languages, which includes Gagauz and Azeri. The Oghuz languages form the Southwestern subgroup of the Turkic languages, a language family comprising some thirty living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, which some linguists believe to be a part of a larger Altaic language family. About 40% of Turkic language speakers are Turkish speakers.The characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family and the Altaic languages. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and the other Oghuz languages, including Azeri, Turkmen, Qashqai, and Gagauz.
History
The earliest forms of the Turkish language were written in Orkhon script.
During the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish was influenced mainly by Arabic and Persian. The primary writing system was based on Arabic and Persian script. Due to the difficulty of learning the language only about 10% of the Ottoman Turkish population were literate.
However, in 1928, modern Turkey's greatest hero, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had changed many things about the Turkish language. He changed the writing system to a Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet (without the letters Q, W or X, and added the letters Ö from Swedish, Ç from Albanian, Ş from Romanian, and Ü from German; and also added the letters Ğ, I, and İ to represent certain sounds which weren't present in any other Latin-based languages at the time), and replaced many old Turkish words with new loanwords*. The change of the writing system heavily benefited Turkey's youth, and during the 1930s, the literacy rate shot up to 70%. Today, the overall literacy rate for both males and females is approximately 87%, but the reason for the seemingly low literacy rate (for our time) has to do with personal family matters rather than any difficulty, even though it's compulsory for all Turks to go to school up to the age of 16, so technically they're parents are both breaking the law and depriving their children of a wonderful gift: knowing how to read and write.
Geographic distribution of Turkish
In terms of number of speakers, Turkish is the largest Turkic language in the world, spoken by approximately 100 million people worldwide.
Turkish is the official language of Turkey, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Kosovo.
There are also two million Turcophones in Germany, due to it's very large Turkish minority living there; a slightly smaller minority living in Bulgaria; and also over 100,000 living in France, Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Austria, United States and Uzbekistan. There are also smaller Turkish-speaking minorities living elsewhere, most notably Greece, Russia, Canada and Azerbaijan*.
Dialects
Within Turkey
Standard Turkish is basically the Turkish spoken in Istanbul, which has no particular accent, and is spoken clearly, smoothly and slang words are non-existent.
However, Turkey is a place full of surprises and diversity, and many dialects of Turkish exist. Here are the most common:
* Rumelice, which is spoken by muhajirs in the Rumelian area.
* Edirne, spoken by the inhabitants of Edirne*.
* Doğu, spoken in eastern Turkey, influenced by Azerbaijani.
* Güneydoğu, spoken in southeastern Turkey, heavily influenced by Kurdish.
* Karadeniz / Laz, the former spoken in northern Turkey in areas surrounding the Black Sea, and the latter spoken by Laz people in the same region*.
Outside Turkey
* Karamanlıca - spoken in Greece by Karamanlides, a Greek Orthodox, Turkish-speaking peoples whose ancestry goes back to Central Anatolia.
* Kıbrıs - a dialect of Turkish spoken by Turkish Cypriots.
So yes, there's a variety of different dialects spoken by Turks, but don't let that put you off, because most Turks, regardless of whether they speak standard Turkish or a certain dialect, will understand standard Turkish, as it's the standard for all schools in Turkey and Northern Cyprus.
Learning the language
Many people whose native language is not Turkish complain that Turkish is very hard to learn. Turkish, being an Altaic language, has grammar and vocabulary that is very different from Indo-European languages. Learning Dutch for a Brit or learning Italian for a Romanian is much easier than them learning Turkish. On the other hand, there are similar languages to Turkish such as Mongolian or Kazakh.
Nevertheless, Turkish has its advantages, many of which are obvious from a quick glance at a Turkish-English dictionary:
* There is no pronunciation help next to the word. Because every letter is pronounced same in every word.
Turkish is phonetic.
Learning the alphabet is enough to pronounce the word correctly.
Once you hear a word, you'll know where to look in the dictionary.
* There are no dots dividing the word into its syllables or marks indicating a stressed syllable.
Spelling determines the syllable count and stress.
* There are no inflected forms.
Turkish nouns have no gender and its verbs are all regular.
Look at a noun and you'll know all its declensions.
Look at a verb and you'll know its tense, voice, etc.
* Turkish has no articles.
* You can hardly ever find exceptions in Turkish. Nearly all words obey strict rules.
The benefits of learning Turkish
Approximately 250 million people worldwide speak a Turkic language, Turkish being the most common. However, all Turkic languages have a very high degree of mutual intelligibility, therefore learning Turkish means you can speak to 100 million more people properly, and 150 million more roughly, but still understanding the basic gist of the conversation.
So, 250 million, that's a lot of people, huh? Doesn't that sound like good business and marketing opportunities to you? Trust me, Turkic countries aren't as impoverished as you think. The West's definition of poor is actually very exaggerated. Just because a country is poor or in terrible conditions, doesn't mean it's a bad place to do business. Take Africa, for example. At the moment African countries have the fastest growing mobile market in the world. When enterpreuners hear news like this, they immediately find that Africa's got potential to give them lots of money in the mobile phone industry. As for Turkey, it's richer and in better shape than most African countries (except maybe Seychelles or Mauritius, but that's about it), so financially you could do really well there. As a matter of fact, Turkey is a member of the G20, and is the 17th most industrialised country in the world. Turkey's GDP ranks 17th, and has one of the fastest GDP growth rates in the world. Turkey has a developed services sector; a large, rapidly growing tourism sector; as well as construction, electronics, textiles and automotive industries which are very important to Turkey's economy. So who said Turkey's economy was bad?
Turkey and Northern Cyprus are also political hotspots, with many things going on in the Turkish parliament and politics. If you ever have to deal with Turkish or Turkish Cypriot affairs, learning the language would be highly beneficial.
On a much less serious matter, Turkish is a very beautiful-sounding language. Turkey and Northern Cyprus are actually incredibly beautiful places themselves, and are definitely worth visiting, so knowing the local language would be very useful.
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