15 Things You Should Know About the Turkish Language

15 Characteristic Things of the Turkish Language

Many people today are interested in Turkish culture and language. In particular the turkish language presents unique characteristicsdifferent from any other language on the planet.

Let’s look at 15 important things about the Turkish language:

1) Turkish is the official language in Turkey and in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. We must also count the large Turkish communities in other countries such as Uzbekistan, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, the USA, Greece, Romania, Azerbaijan, Russia.

2) Currently it is spoken by about 85 million people.

3) Turkish belongs to the family of Turkic languages. It has nothing to do with Semitic languages, such as Arabic. The languages ​​most similar to Turkish are Azeri and Turkmen.

4) The first written words appeared on the Orkhon inscriptions, Mongolia and date from the years 732-35 AD. Although some linguists think that Turkish is one of the oldest languages ​​in the world. Turkish has nothing to do with the ancient Anatolian languages, which were spoken before the Turks arrived.

5) The Turkish spoken today is different from the Turkish spoken during the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turk it was written with the Arabic alphabet, it had a mixture of Arabic, Persian and Turkish words, but was not arabic.

6) The Turkish language spoken today arose in the 20th century thanks to President Ataturk and his language reform.

7) In the ottoman turkish reform to the current Turk the most important thing was the change from arabic to latin alphabet:

It was a big task and you can see how and why the Turkish language was changed in record time.

8) Modern Turkish is written with the Latin alphabet. but it does not have the letters q,w,x and adds 3 vowels ü, ı, ö and the consonants ç, silent g and ş.

9) Turkish is phonetic. That is, if we learn the pronunciation of the alphabet, we can know how a word is pronounced like in English.

10) Its rules are more or less regular, and its grammar doesn’t have many exceptions (compared to other languages).

11) The structure of sentences: Subject – Predicate – Verb.

12) Words are armed with a suffix system added to the root of the word.

13) Another important characteristic of Turkish is the “declination”. There are 6 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative.

14) The harmony of sound is another peculiarity of Turkish: each word has a specific combination of vowels and consonants so that sound harmoniously.

15) Nouns they have no gender and are used for both men and women (as in English) and no items are used.