Turkish language

Turkish (Türkçe or Türk dili) is a Turkic language, spoken natively by over 100 million speakers in Turkey, Cyprus, and worldwide.

Classification

Geographic distribution

Official status

Dialects

Many other languages are spoken in Turkey, including: Pontic Greek in the Trabzon area (pontos being Black Sea in Greek). A modern version of Aramaic is also spoken in some villages in central and southern Turkey, and an Arabic dialect is spoken southwest of the Van sea. From the South Caucasian language groups, the Laz and Georgian languages are widely used in northeast Turkey, as is Cherkess in many villages which are geographically rather spread out. Also in the soulth east Kirmanch and Zaza are spoken which is also generalised as (Kurdish) even though the two dialects are significantly different. Some scholars consider these two different languages. In addition, several other Turkic languages are spoken by small groups. A small Jewish minority in Istanbul speaks "Ladino", also called "Judeo-Spanish", from descendants of Jews who fled from Spain in 1492 and found refuge in the Istanbul area. Professor Einar Haugen (1906-1994) of Norway who studied "ekte gudbrandsdalmċl" - a dialect spoken in the Gudbrandsdalen district of Norway - among Norwegian immigrants in Iowa, found "frozen" remnants of Kretic and old Spanish dialects from Turkey, making the country extremely interesting for language researchers and social anthropologists.

Sounds

Vocalic system

Grammar

• göz means "eye." By adding the suffix -lük, we have gözlük, which means "glasses." If we add another suffix -çü, we have gözlükçü, which means "someone who sells glasses." By adding another suffix -lük, we have gözlükçülük, which means "the business of selling glasses." To this word, we can add the suffix -te (which is the suffix for "in","on","at"), making the word gözlükçülükte, which means "in the business of selling glasses."

• gel is the root for verb "come." By adding the negation suffix -me, we have gelme, which means "do not come." By adding the suffix -miş (the suffix for perfective tense), we have gelmemiş, which means "he/she/it has not come." By adding another suffix, -ti (the suffix for simple past tense), we have gelmemişti, meaning "he/she/it had not come." By adding the suffix -n (the suffix for singular second person in verbal system), we obtain gelmemiştin, meaning "you had not come." We can add another suffix -iz (the suffix which pluralizes the second person singular): gelmemiştiniz "you (plural) had not come." Finally, we can go even one step further and insert the question particle -mi (with the addition of consonant -y-, which becomes necessary to avoid having two contiguous sounds of i and d) between the two suffixes of -miş and -ti: gelmemiş miydiniz? ("hadn't you (plural) come?").

Word order in Turkish is Subject Object Verb similar to Japanese and Latin, but unlike English.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of the Turkish language is a subject that is worth discussion, as the language's vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in history.

Replaced old words

When the Turks came from middle Asia to Anatolia about thousand years ago, they came in contact with Islam and the Arabic societies. Since the Turks accepted Islam, Arabic words (and less, yet still many, Persian words) started infiltrating the language. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish kept borrowing loan words from these two languages. Towards the end of the 19th century, this got to a point where the language was rather called the Ottoman language. This is because Turkish had been inundated with so many loan words that the language became a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. In contemporary Turkey, the Ottoman language is almost incomprehensible.

After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), whose task was to replace Arabic and Persian origin words with their new Turkish counterparts. The foundation did succeed in expelling over a few hundred Arabic words from the language, which are now considered obsolete in Turkish today. 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.

It is remarkable to note that different generations in Turkey prefer to use different words to express the same meaning. While the generations born upto the 1940's have tendency to use the old Arabic origin words (even the obsolete ones), the younger generations favor using the new words. Even though most of the new words completely replaced the old ones, some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of the old words.

Here are some examples of the old (Arabic origin) words with their new Turkish equivalents:

(* Old words that are still used in modern Turkish together with their new Turkish words.)

(** Words that are not as frequently used as the old words.)

(*** Old words that are Persian origin.)

Current loan words

Arabic loan words