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Turkish language (Türkçe): overview, classification, script and features

Comprehensive overview of Turkish (Türkçe): its classification within Turkic languages, writing system history, phonology, grammar traits, cultural role and modern use.

Author: Leandro Alegsa Creation date: November 13, 2022 Last updated: May 30, 2026

en.wikipedia.org · Public domain

Overview

Turkish, known endonymously as Türkçe, is the principal language of the Republic of Turkey and an official language in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. It is widely used in public life, education and media within those polities and is spoken by large migrant and descendant communities throughout Europe and beyond. For general background on its distribution and official status see overview, official Turkey sources at Turkey, the situation in Northern Cyprus at Northern Cyprus, and diaspora communities in Europe at European Turkish communities.

Classification and relatives

Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family, a branch of languages spread across a wide Eurasian arc. It shares the closest affinities with languages such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Kazakh. For comparative information see Turkic family, and specific profiles at Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Kazakh. There are broader theories that group Turkic languages with other Eurasian families under an Altaic hypothesis; this idea, covering languages such as Japanese, Mongolian and Korean, is treated separately in comparative linguistics literature at Altaic studies and related summaries for Japanese, Mongolian and Korean.

Writing systems and reform

Historically, Turkish was written in variants of the Arabic script during the Ottoman period. This orthography reflected Ottoman Turkish, a form with heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary influence; historical sources discuss that script at Ottoman script. In 1928 a major reform led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk replaced the Arabic-based alphabet with a modified Latin alphabet in order to improve literacy and better represent modern Turkish phonology; see biographical and reform contexts at Atatürk and summaries of the language reform at language reform. The shift also had social and administrative consequences related to disengagement from many Ottoman-era written records and institutions, as noted in histories at Ottoman legacy.

Alphabet and orthography

The modern Turkish alphabet contains 29 letters. It was designed to be largely phonemic: most letters correspond to single sounds. Seven characters differ from basic Latin letters to reflect Turkish phonemes: Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü. The writing system is praised for its regularity and is described in practical guides to transcription at transcription notes and official alphabet references at Turkish alphabet. One distinctive orthographic feature is the dotted and dotless i distinction, which affects casing and pronunciation and often surprises learners.

Structure, phonology and grammar

Turkish is typologically agglutinative: words are built from stems plus sequences of suffixes that each encode a separate grammatical meaning. Vowel harmony is a central phonological constraint that conditions the form of many suffixes, producing a regular alternation of vowel qualities. Typical sentence order is subject–object–verb (SOV), though pragmatic factors permit variation. There is no grammatical gender, and word formation allows productive derivation and compounding. Common introductory discussions and examples can be found at language primers and comparative grammars at Turkic comparison.

Uses, literature and cultural role

Modern Turkish serves as the language of government, schooling and mass media in Turkey and Northern Cyprus; it is the medium for a rich modern literature, theater and film culture. After the early republican reforms, institutions for standardizing and researching the language were established to promote education and a standardized national language, documented in studies accessible via state education and linguistic organizations at language institutions. Turkish remains a living language with regional varieties and dialects influenced by contact languages, migration, and contemporary media; for sociolinguistic perspectives see diaspora studies and regional surveys at Central Asian contacts.

Distinctive facts and further resources

Agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony shape much of Turkish grammar; introductory treatments are available at grammar overview.
The 1928 alphabet reform is a clear example of language policy with rapid societal impact; policy analyses appear at language policy and historical studies at literacy and reform.
For comparative typology and classroom resources, consult general language guides at typology resources and learner materials at learn Turkish, learning tools, or language centers.
Further reading and curated collections of scholarly work are indexed at historical texts, biographical sources, reform archives, Ottoman studies, orthography research and alphabet resources.

These entries aim to provide a concise but rounded introduction to Turkish: its place among Turkic languages, the distinctive sound and writing systems that define it, the historical turning points that shaped the modern standard, and the grammatical characteristics learners and scholars encounter.

Distribution

Today's Turkish is the mother tongue of about 80 percent of the people in Turkey (which was just over 63 million people at the end of 2015) and was also so for 37,000 people in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, according to estimates in 1979. Turkish was also the mother tongue for 606,000 people in Bulgaria in 2011, for about 290,000 people in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and for 128,380 people in Greece in 1976.

63,600 speakers lived in Belgium in 1984, about 70,000 in Austria (Ethnologue 2009) and more than 1.5 million in Germany. Furthermore, in Romania, 14,000 people still spoke the Turkish language in 1982, and on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, especially in Kosovo, where it is also an official language, and in Northern Macedonia, 250,000 people speak Turkish.

In 1990, Turkish was still the native language for about 3,000 people in Iraq and 2,500 in Iran. In 1970, 24,123 speakers of Turkish lived in the USA, and 8,863 native speakers of Turkish were reported for Canada in 1974. In France, some 135,000 people reported Turkish as their mother tongue in 1984, and in the Netherlands, nearly 150,000. In 1988, some 5,000 Turkish speakers were registered in Sweden.

In 2009, about 85 million people spoke Turkish, including 65 million as a mother tongue and 20 million as a second language.

Today, Azerbaijani is considered the closest relative of Turkic. The language of the Southeast European Gagauz (Republic of Moldova and the Balkans) is often regarded as a dialect of Turkic, although this is disputed. Thus, the Turkologists of Western Europe cite Gagauz as a language in its own right and those in the Turkic states as a dialect of Turkic due to the small distance between them. Mutual oral and written communication between speakers of Turkish, Azerbaijani and Gagauz is possible without major difficulties. The language relationship is roughly comparable to the relationship between Danish and Norwegian.

Turkmen has a slightly larger language gap compared to Turkish, so a conversation between Turkish and Turkmen speakers, for example, is much more laborious in speech or writing. The ratio is roughly equivalent to the language gap between Swedish and Danish. The linguistic differences mainly stem from the fact that Turkmen, which to this day is highly dialectally fragmented, has been under the influence of various languages such as Persian and Russian, not to mention non-Yugu, Central Asian Turkic languages such as Chagataic.

Due to these different linguistic distances, Turkish, Gagauz and Azerbaijani are grouped together within the Oghuz languages as West Oghuz languages, while Turkmen is attributed to an East Oghuz branch.

The Turkic-speaking world: countries with significant numbers of Turkic-speaking populations. Legend: Official language: Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Macedonia (at municipal level), Kosovo (at municipal level) More than 1,000,000 speakers: Germany Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Speakers: Bulgaria, Iraq, Greece Between 100,000 and 500,000 speakers: France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, United States, Uzbekistan Between 25,000 and 100,000 speakers: Great Britain, Australia, Azerbaijan, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania Less than 25,000 speakers/none: Other countries

Phonology

Consonants

Consonants of Standard Turkish

Postalveolar

Glottal

tʃ

dʒ

Flap

Approximant

Lateral

The phoneme /ɣ/ (usually called yumuşak g ("soft g")), ğ never appears at the beginning of a word, but always follows a vowel. At the end of words or before consonants, it indicates the long pronunciation of the preceding vowel.

In words of Turkish origin, the sounds /c/, /ɟ/ and /l/ represent allophones of /k/, /g/ and /ɫ/; the former appear before front-tongue vowels, the latter before back-tongue vowels. However, the distribution of these phonemes is often unpredictable in words and proper names of foreign language origin. In such words, /c/, /ɟ/ and /l/ often appear before back-tongue vowels.

Turkish (like German) is vowel-hardening, i.e. voiced sounds become voiceless at the end of a word, so the actual stem of kebap is kebab-.

Vowels

Turkish vowels
	Front		Rear
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
High	i [i], e [e]	ü [y]	ı [ɯ]	u [u]
Deep	e [æ]	ö [œ]	a [a	o [o]

The vowels of Turkish are, in their alphabetical order, a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, and ü. The letter e is used both regularly for the unrounded nearly open front-tongue vowel, and less frequently for the unrounded semi-closed front-tongue vowel. The <ı> without a dot is the unrounded closed back-tongue vowel [ɯ]. There are no diphthongs in Turkish; when two vowels meet, which happens rarely and only in loan words, each vowel is pronounced separately. However, some kind of diphthong may occur when the yumuşak g is between two vowels. Thus, the word soğuk ("cold") may be pronounced [soʊk] by some speakers.

Questions and Answers

Q: What language is officially spoken in Turkey and Northern Cyprus?

A: Turkish (Türkçe) or Anatolian Turkic is the language officially spoken in Turkey and Northern Cyprus.

Q: How is Turkish related to other languages?

A: Turkish is a Turkic language and it is most closely related to other Turkic languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Kazakh. It has also been theorized that it could be one of the many Altaic languages which include Japanese, Mongolian, and Korean.

Q: What alphabet was used for writing Turkish before 1928?

A: Before 1928, Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet.

Q: Who changed the writing system from Arabic to Latin?

A: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed the writing system from Arabic to Latin.

Q: Why did Atatürk change the writing system from Arabic to Latin?

A: The government justified changing the writing system as making Turkish much easier to learn in order to increase literacy rates. It was also said that this move was done in order to distance the country from its Ottoman Empire roots whose documents can no longer be read except by a few scholars.

Q: How many letters are there in the current official alphabet of Turkish?

A: The current official alphabet of Turkish has 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for phonetic requirements of the language.

Q: How accurately does this new alphabet reflect modern pronunciation of spoken Turkish?

A: This new alphabet reflects modern pronunciation of spoken Turkish with a high degree accuracy and specificity.

Author

AlegsaOnline.com - Turkish language - Leandro Alegsa

Creation date: November 13, 2022
Last updated: May 30, 2026

URL: https://en.alegsaonline.com/art/102106