Turkish language

The Turkish language - also Turkish or Ottoman Turkish - is an agglutinative language and belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages. As the most widely spoken Turkic language, it is the official language in Turkey and, along with Greek, also in Cyprus (as well as in the internationally unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus). Turkish is also used as the local official language in northern Macedonia, Romania and Kosovo. Proper names are Türk dili, Türkçe [tyɾkt͡ʃe] and Türkiye Türkçesi.

The Turkish language itself has a number of dialects, of which the Istanbul dialect is of particular importance. Its phonetics is the basis of the modern Turkish language. When the Latin alphabet was introduced for the Turkish language in 1928, the historical orthography of Ottoman Turkish was not used, but the pronunciation of Istanbul was used as the basis of the orthography. The dialects within Turkey are divided into groups of the Black Sea region (Karadeniz Şivesi), Eastern Anatolia (Doğu Anadolu Şivesi), Southeastern Anatolia (Güneydoğu Anadolu Şivesi), Central Anatolia (İç Anadolu Şivesi), Aegean (Ege Şivesi) and Mediterranean region (Akdeniz Şivesi).

However, the alternative name "Turkish Turkish" includes not only Turkey, but also all areas of the former Ottoman Empire. This means that the Balkan or Cypriot Turks also speak a "Turkic".

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

Bilabial

Labiodental

Dental

Alveolar

Postalveolar

Palatal

Velar

Glottal

Plosive

p

b

t

d

c

k

Nasal

m

n

Fricative

f

v

s

z

h

Affricate

tʃ

dʒ

Flap

Approximant

j

Lateral

l

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.

Vowel trapeze for the Turkish vowels