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Turkish language

Turkish belongs to the Altay branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family, same as Finnish and Hungarian. It is the westernmost of the Turkic languages spoken across Central Asia and is generally classified as a member of the South-West group, also known as the Oguz group. Other Turkic languages, all of which are closely related, include Azerbaijani (Azeri), Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek, and many others spoken from the Balkans across Central Asia into northwestern China and southern Siberia. Turkic languages are often grouped with Mongolian and Tungusic languages in the Altaic language family. Strictly speaking, the "Turkish" languages spoken between Mongolia and TurkeyTurkey alone. It is common practice, however, to refer to all these languages as Turkish, and differentiate them with reference to the geographical area, for example, the Turkish language of Azerbaijan.
Through the span of history, Turks have spread over a wide geographical area, taking their language with them. Turkish speaking people have lived in a wide area stretching from today's Mongolia to the north coast of the Black Sea, the Balkans, East Europe, Anatolia, Iraq and a wide area of northern Africa. Due to the distances involved, various dialects and accents have emerged. Turkish is also the language spoken at home by people who live in the areas that were governed by the Ottoman Empire. For instance, in Bulgaria there are over a million speakers. About 50,000 Turkish speakers live in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan. In Cyprus, Turkish is a co-official language (with Greek) where it is spoken as a first language by 19 percent of the population, especially in the North (KKTC). Over 1.5 million speakers are found in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece; over 2.5 million speakers live in Germany (and other northern European countries) where Turks have for many years been "guest workers." About 40,000 Turkish speakers live in the United States.
Turkish has several dialects. The Turkish dialects can be divided into two major groups: Western dialects and Eastern dialects. Of the major Turkish dialects, Danubian appears to be the only member of the Western group. The following dialects make up the Eastern group: Eskisehir, Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanli, Edirne, Gaziantep, and Urfa. There are some other classifications that distinguish the following dialect groups: South-western, Central Anatolia, Eastern, Rumelian, and Kastamonu dialects. Modern standard Turkish is based on the Istanbul dialect of Anatolian.
The history of the language is divided into three main groups, old Turkish (from the 7th to the 13th centuries), mid-Turkish (from the 13th to the 20th) and new Turkish from the 20th century onwards. During the Ottoman Empire period Arabic and Persian words invaded the Turkish language and it consequently became mixed with three different languages. During the Ottoman period which spanned five centuries, the natural development of Turkish was severely hampered. Turkish formed the basis for Ottoman Turkish, the written language of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkish was basically Turkish in structure, but with a heavy overlay of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and an occasional grammatical influence. Ottoman Turkish co-existed with spoken Turkish, with the latter being considered a "gutter language" and not worthy of study. Ottoman Turkish, and the spoken language were both represented with an Arabic script.




Then there was the "new language" movement started by Kemal Atatürk. In 1928, five years after the proclamation of the Republic, the Arabic alphabet was replaced by the Latin one, which in turn speeded up the movement to rid the language of foreign words. Prior to the reform that introduced the Roman script, Turkish was written in the Arabic script. Up to the fifteenth century the Anatolian Turks used the Uighur script to write Turkish. The Turkish Language Institute (Turk Dil Kurumu) was established in 1932 to carry out linguistic research and contribute to the natural development of the language. As a consequence of these efforts, modern Turkish is a literary and cultural language developing naturally and free of foreign influences. Today literacy rates in Turkey are over 90%.
Like all of the Turkic languages, Turkish is agglutinative, that is, grammatical functions are indicated by adding various suffixes to stems. Separate suffixes on nouns indicate both gender and number, but there is no grammatical gender. Nouns are declined in three declensions with six case endings: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and ablative; number is marked by a plural suffix. Verbs agree with their subjects in case and number, and, as in nouns, separate identifiable suffixes perform these functions. The order of elements in a verb form is: verb stem + tense aspect marker + subject affix. There is no definite article; the number "one" may be used as an indefinite article.

Subject-Object-Verb word order in Turkish is a typical Turkic characteristic, but other orders are possible under certain discourse situations. As a SOV language where objects precede the verb, Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions, and relative clauses that precede the verb.

Turkish has 8 vowels, and 21 consonants. It also has Turkic vowel harmony in which the vowels of suffixes must harmonize with the vowels of noun and verb stems; thus, for example, if the stem has a round vowel then the vowel of the suffix must be round, and so on. Stress on words pronounced in isolation is on the final syllable, but in discourse, stress assignment is complicated especially in the verb.

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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.

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 equivalents. 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 equivalents 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.

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Turkish Language Association

The Turkish Language Association (Turkish: Türk Dil Kurumu - TDK) is the official regulatory body of the Turkish language, founded on July 12, 1932 and headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The association acts as the official authority on the language (without any enforcement power), contributes to linguistic research on Turkish and other Turkic languages, and is charged with publishing the official dictionary of the language, Güncel Türkçe Sözlük.

History

The association was established on July 12, 1932 under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti (Society for Research on the Turkish Language) by the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, by Samih Rıfat, Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın, Celâl Sahir Erozan and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, all prominent names in the literature of the period and members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The head specialist and Secretary General of the association was the Armenian linguist Agop Dilaçar starting from 1934, who continued to work in the association until his death in 1979.

Functions

The association heads the academic efforts for linguistic research on the Turkish language and its sister Turkic languages of Central Asia. Another primary mission of the association is to maintain and publish Türkçe Sözlük, the official Turkish dictionary, and Yazım Kılavuzu, the Turkish writing guide, in addition to many other specialized dictionaries, linguistics books and several periodicals.
The association strives to protect the integrity of the Turkish language and was a key institution in the struggle of the Republic of Turkey to re-position itself as a secular nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the 1930s and 1940s, it has led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic, Persian, Greek and French loanwords whose immense use in the Turkish language during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Republic had created a literary language considerably different from the spoken Turkish of the time, which is now called Ottoman Turkish.
Recently however, the attention of the association has been turned towards the persistent infiltration of Turkish, like many other languages, with English words, as a result of the globalization process. Since the 1980s, TDK constantly campaigns for the use of the Turkish equivalents of these new English loanwords. It also has the task of linguistically deriving such words from existing Turkish roots if no such equivalents exist, and actively promoting the adoption of these new coinages instead of their English equivalents in the daily lives of the Turkish people. Some successful examples of suggestions for Information Technology terms include:
English loanword computer hardware software digital processor online/offline microchip genetics Turkish equivalent bilgisayar donanım yazılım sayısal işlemci çevrimiçi/çevrimdışı yonga kalıtım There have been criticisms of the association domestically—mostly for some of the new coinages which sound overly artificial—and internationally such as the linguist H.C. Hony, writing in 1947, describing the organisation as "composed almost entirely of politicians" and its proceedings full of "arrant nonsense" and "absurdities". Hony described the three aims underlying the workings of the association as "the desire to make a complete cut with the past", "the desire to be considered a member of the European society of nations" and "a narrow and rabid nationalism".
Turkey currently doesn't have a legal framework to enforce by law the recommendations of TDK in public life (contrary to Académie française in France, for example). On the other hand, there is a bill that is in consideration in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey at the moment that would give TDK and the Ministries of Education and Culture the tools to enforce legally the labelling of Turkish equivalents of these words next to their foreign counterparts, particularly in the news media, advertising, and commercial communications.

Publications

The association, in addition to maintaining Türkçe Sözlük and Yazım Kılavuzu has published more than 850 linguistics related books, mainly consisting of studies on Turkic languages, specialized dictionaries, philological books, and works of literature.
TDK also publishes Türk Dili, a journal on Turkish literature, since 1951, Belleten, the annual journal on Turkic languages, since 1953, and Türk Dünyası, another periodical published twice a year on Turkish language and literature since 1996.

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