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 Turkish today
The history of Turkish
Names and writing system
The history of Turkish
Turkish, a member of the Altaic language family, is the national language of Turkey, but is also widely spoken by Turkish minorities in Central Asia, the Balkans, the Near East and the north of Cyprus. Turkish is an agglutinative language. Words are composed of long sequences of units, with each unit expressing a particular grammatical meaning: | | | gelemeyebilirim | I may not be able to come | | gelemeyebiliriz | we may not be able to come | | gelebiliriz | we may be able to come |
The other striking feature of Turkish is vowel harmony - the vowels of the different units are changed so that they agree with the 'colour' of the root vowel. For instance, the plural of ev (house) is evler.Following President Kemal Atatürk's programme of secularisation and westernization, Islam ceased to be the official state religion of Turkey in 1928. However, the overwhelming majority of the population is Muslim and, of these, about four-fifths are Sunnis. The same is true of other Turkish-speaking communities.Over the centuries, Turkish borrowed numerous Arabic and Persian words and constructions. In recent years, however, many expressions of foreign origin have been replaced with Turkish-derived ones.
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