Turkish Language

Turkish is a language spoken by 75 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey, with smaller ranges in Cyprus, Bulgaria, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Turkish is also spoken by several million immigrants in Western Europe, particularly in Germany.

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

between Turkish and the other Oghuz languages, including 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 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia. and Siberia. Some linguists believe the Turkic languages 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 intelligibilityAzeri, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish.

History

are dated to the second half of the written using the The earliest known Turkic inscriptions reside in modern Mongolia. The Bugut inscriptions written in the Sogdian alphabet during the First Göktürk Khanate6th century. The two monumental Orkhon inscriptions, erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khan and dating back to some time between 732 and 735, constitute another important early record. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic languageOrkhon script, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to an external similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.

Ottoman Turkish

Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Ottoman Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters and a great quantity of imported words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922) was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably from the period's everyday spoken Turkish, and is termed Ottoman Turkish.
Kaynak: ReformTürk http://www.reformturk.com/showthread.php?p=107658

Language reform and modern Turkish

After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey and the script reform, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly-established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with Turkish *****alents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries.

Due to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his monumental speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman diction which today sounds so alien that it has had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995. There is also a political dimension to the language debate, with conservative groups tending to use more archaic words in the press or everyday language.
The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance.

However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as bölem to replace fırka, "political party"—also failed to meet with popular approval (in fact, fırka has been replaced by the French loanword parti). Some words restored from Old Turkicbetik (originally meaning "book") is now used to mean "script" in computer science.
Many of the words derived by TDK coexist with their older counterparts. This usually happens when a loanword changes its original meaning. For instance, dert, derived from the Persian dard (درد "pain"), means "problem" or "trouble" in Turkish; whereas the native Turkish word ağrı and is used for physical pain. Sometimes the loanword has a slightly different meaning from the native Turkish word, giving rise to a situation similar to the coexistence of Germanic and Romance words in English. Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, cardinal directions, some months' names, and many nouns and adjectives.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is natively spoken by the Turkish people in Turkey and by the Turkish diaspora in some 30 other countries. In particular, Turkish-speaking minorities exist in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece (primarily in Western Thrace), the Republic of Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. More than two million Turkish speakers live in Germany, and there are significant Turkish-speaking communities in France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Due to the cultural assimilation of Turkish immigrants in host countries, not all ethnic Turkish immigrants speak the language with native fluency.

The number of native speakers in Turkey is about 60–67 million, corresponding to about 90–93 percent of the population, and 65–73 million native speakers exist worldwide.Turkish is spoken as a first or second language by almost all of Turkey's residents, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder (about 3,950,000 as estimated in 1980). However, even most linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language to levels of native fluency.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. It also has official (but not primary) status in the Prizren District of Kosovo and several municipalities of the Republic of Macedonia, depending on the concentration of Turkish-speaking local population.

In Turkey, the regulatory body for Turkish is the Turkish Language AssociationTürk Dil Kurumu or TDK), which was founded in 1932 under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for Research on the Turkish Language"). The Turkish Language Association was influenced by the ideology of linguistic purism: indeed one of its primary tasks was the replacement of loanwords and foreign grammatical constructions with *****alents of Turkish origin. These changes, together with the adoption of the new Turkish alphabet in 1928, shaped the modern Turkish language spoken today. TDK became an independent body in 1951, with the lifting of the requirement that it should be presided over by the Minister of Education. This status continued until August 1983, when it was again made into a governmental body in the constitution of 1982, following the military coup d'état of 1980.

Dialects

Istanbul Turkish is established as the official standard language of Turkey. Dialectal variation persists, in spite of the levelling influence of the standard used in mass media and the Turkish education system since the 1930s. Academically, researchers from Turkey often refer to Turkish dialects as ağız or şive, leading to an ambiguity with the linguistic concept of accent, which is also covered with these same words. Projects investigating Turkish dialects are being carried out by several universities, as well as a dedicated work group of the Turkish Language Association. Work is currently in progress for the compilation and publication of their research as a comprehensive dialect atlas of the Turkish language.

The standard dialect of the Turkish language is İstanbul. Rumelice is spoken by immigrants from Rumelia, and includes the distinct dialects of Deliorman, Dinler, and Adakale, which are influenced by the theoretized Balkan linguistic union. Kıbrıs is the name for Cypriot Turkish and is spoken by the Turkish Cypriots. Edirne is the dialect of Edirne. Ege is spoken in the Aegean region, with its usage extending to Antalya. The nomadic Yörük tribes of the Mediterranean Region of Turkey also have their own dialect of Turkish] This group is not to be confused with the Yuruk nomads of Macedonia, Greece, and European Turkey who speak Balkan Gagauz Turkish.

Güneydoğu is spoken in the southeast, to the east of Mersin. Doğu, a dialect in Eastern Anatolia, has a dialect continuum with Azeri, particularly with Karapapak dialects in some areas. The Central Anatolia region speaks Orta Anadolu. Karadeniz, spoken in the Eastern Black Sea Region and represented primarily by the Trabzon dialect, exhibits substratum influence from Greek in phonology and syntax Kastamonu is spoken in Kastamonu and its surrounding areas. The Hemşinli dialect, known as Hemşince, is spoken by the western group of Hamshenis around Rize, influenced by Armenian. Karamanlıca is spoken in Greece, where it is also named Kαραμανλήδικα (Karamanlidika). It is the literary standard for Karamanlides.