The Turkish (Türkçe) Language

The ancestor of modern Turkish, Oghuz, was bought to Anatolia from Central Asia during the 11th century AD by Seljuq Turks. The Turkish language goes back 5500 to 8500 years. Turkish is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish, and there is considerable mutual articulacy between these languages.

Today Turkish is spoken by about 88 million people, mainly in Turkey. The breakdown of where people speak Turkish is as follows 82 million Turkish speakers in Turkey. 2 million in Germany, 606,000 in Bulgaria, 500,000 in the UK, 300,000 in Northern Cyprus, 165,000 in the USA, 130,000 in Uzbekistan. As it gets easier to enter countries globally more Turkish is spoken in other countries.

Written

The oldest written records are found upon stone monuments in Central Asia, in the Orhon, Yenisey, and Talas regions within present-day Mongolia boundaries. These monuments document the social and political life of the Gokturk Dynasty.

Turkish was written with the Arabic script that was adopted in the 15th century. In 1928 the Roman alphabet was implemented as part of an effort to Europeanize Turkey.

The modern Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. The following letters were approved to represent Turkish sounds: Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, and Ü.

The Turkish alphabet:

A aB bC cÇ çD dE eF fG gĞ ğH hL lI ıİ iJ jK k
L lM mN nO oÖ öP pR rS sŞ şT tU uÜ üV vY yZ z

The Turkish language has a phonetic structure. Word order in Turkish sentences is normally Subject-Object-Verb. However, other orders are possible, depending on discourse-oriented considerations such as emphasis. Stress in Turkish words is normally placed on the final syllable.

Nouns

  • Turkish nouns are marked for number (singular and plural).
  • There is no expressed grammatical gender: the pronoun o means ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’.
  • There are six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative ablative. Cases are marked by inflectional suffixes. They are governed by verbs and postpositions.
  • There are no articles.

Verbs

Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They have the following grammatical categories:

  • singular and plural
  • 1st, 2nd, 3rd person
  • Five moods: indicative, dubitative, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive
  • Active and passive voices
    • With different forms for passive transitive and passive intransitive verbs
  • Present, past, future tense of conjugation

Sounds

The sound system of the language is characterized by vowel harmony a type of phonological process that dictates which vowels may be found near each other in a word. There are two kinds of vowels — front vowels produced at the front of the mouth, e.g., /i/, /e/, and back vowels, produced at the back of the mouth, e.g., /a/, /u/, /o/. Native Turkic words can contain either only all front or all back vowels, and all suffixes must conform to the vowel of the syllable preceding them in the word. Turkish has 28 phonemes sounds that make a difference in word meaning.

1762 most useful words and phrases in Turkish

Anyone can learn Turkish words. These are the simplest 125 Turkish lessons ever, quicker, and free. Why pay for a costly Turkish language course online or in-person?  If you take these free lessons from your native language it will begin your language learning journey on a good note. 

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